Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Airport Extreme poor live streaming?

R

RolandNights

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2011
549
0
California
I just got an Airport Extreme, and I've noticed a few issues. Range-wise, it seems to be the same as my last router, but then again, my room is on the completely opposite end of the house. I'm sure there's a lot of interference (walls, physical objects, and there's tons of other WiFi signals in the area), but my MBP re-connects to WiFi after awakening way faster on the AEBS than it did on my last router. Previously, it wouldn't connect X amount of times, or would re-connect with poor signal.

According to Speedtest.net, I'm getting about 19 mb/s. Not sure if that's good or bad, but compared to my last wireless-g router, websites are picking up much more quickly than before, pictures are loading faster, etc, but there's a problem when it comes to streaming.

Whether it be Youtube, Vimeo, justin.tv, or live streaming, I've noticed that things get REALLY slow. It takes forever for videos on Youtube to completely finish loading and live streams on justin.tv don't even show up. Even when I am in the same room as the AEBS, live streams don't even bother coming up. Netflix actually loads just fine, but the video quality has definitely taken a hit. This wasn't an issue with my last router. I thought it was a Flash issue since I put off updating, but after the update, I got the same results. I tried restarting the AEBS (7.6) and my mid-2010 MBP (10.7.2), and yeah, still trouble loading videos. Anyone know why it's such a specific issue with videos?
 
Last edited:
gsahli said:
Get iStumbler, analyze which channels are being over-used nearby, then change your Extreme to a channel not being used.
http://www.istumbler.net/
Click to expand...

That helped somewhat. I hopped on the 2.4 GHZ channel, which at least got the streams to appear. It's still really laggy, though. Netflix video quality is still below par. Nonetheless, this helped a little, so thanks. Any other solutions that don't require me to buy an Express?
 
gsahli said:
Get iStumbler, analyze which channels are being over-used nearby, then change your Extreme to a channel not being used.
http://www.istumbler.net/
Click to expand...

Good idea. And for technical reason I can't really explain you only want to use channels 1, 6, or 11 when using the 2.4 ghz frequency. Has to do with the way the other channels overlap. For the 5gh. Frequency try channel 161.
 
DaveTheRave said:
Good idea. And for technical reason I can't really explain you only want to use channels 1, 6, or 11 when using the 2.4 ghz frequency. Has to do with the way the other channels overlap. For the 5gh. Frequency try channel 161.
Click to expand...

How do you change the channels to 1, 6, or 11? On my network, the 2.4 ghz frequency is channel 2 and the 5 ghz frequency is channel 149.

Update: I figured out how to change the channels. I'll let you know how it works after some trial and error.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back