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sfscott

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 13, 2008
73
0
I'm regularly seeing a drop off of about 40% to 50% bandwidth coming out of my Airport Extreme via WiFi vs. what I get connected directly to the DSL modem.

What do others get? Is there a way to improve? I'm on a gen 3 airport
 

ftaok

macrumors 603
Jan 23, 2002
6,487
1,572
East Coast
You should not expect a wireless connection to get the same throughput as a wired connection.

Yeah, but 40-50% is pretty drastic.

I see maybe a 10% drop using wifi on my Airport Extreme (4th Gen).

Try seeing if switching the channel will help. Could be interference with other 2.4/5 ghz devices.

Also, are you connecting to wifi across a bunch of rooms or floors? If you can, put the AEBS up high, rather than on a table or desk.
 

sfscott

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 13, 2008
73
0
The mac is close to the aebs, but there are a number of peripherals close by.

Other than changing channels, are there other configuration changes that could help?
 

ftaok

macrumors 603
Jan 23, 2002
6,487
1,572
East Coast
Not sure what else you could try.

Have you tried connecting your Mac to the AEBS using ethernet? That'll give you a baseline to compare against connecting directly to the DSL modem. I would expect a small drop in bandwidth when connecting to the AEBS ethernet.

If using ethernet via the AEBS results in a big drop, then the problem may be that your AEBS is dying.

story - we used to use a Netgear router. Slowly over time, our internet speeds were getting worse and worse. Eventually, it was unbearable (<1 Mbps). I decided to check it all out. When I connected directly to the cable modem, I'd get 15 Mbps. When I went wifi, I'd get less than 1 Mbps. When I connected to the router using ethernet, I'd get 2 Mbps. Turns out that the Netgear was dying.

Another thing you might want to try is to turn off any encryption. There's some overhead involved with WEP/WPA/WPA2. See if that helps.
 

CylonGlitch

macrumors 68030
Jul 7, 2009
2,956
268
Nashville
Depends on the age of your router. I had an older Airport Extreme and it would cap out at 4Mb/s even though my Cable was providing 25Mb/s. I went to the Apple store, asked them; told me to upgrade to the latest Extreme, which I did and now have no problems with 25Mb/s all the way down to the computer. Even though it wasn't listed on their website as updated, it was. This could be your problem as well.
 
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