Fast DIRECT/ Slow AIRPORT

[rph105]

Ok just got a iMac for my bday, and had a pc in my room which my bros use to play pc games, now i need my space, so i went out and instead of gettin a normal router I got an airport since now i swear by apple.

Connected it up all fine, but the speeds are drastically slow and my bros PC isnt even connected (only the imac is), i cant even do video conferencing with my boyfriend anymore, tried to dwnload a 70mb file, it sais it would take 21 hours, so i d/c the airport and plugged the modem in direct, speed was fast again, said it would take 3 mins for tht same 70mb file.

Please can someone help me, my friends airport works fine, what should i do.

Any ideas

thanks in advance

 

[Fleetwood Mac]

How far away is the iMac from the AirPort (wireless router)? Which iMac do you have (Model/OS)? Which AirPort do you have?

 

[rph105]

How far away is the iMac from the AirPort (wireless router)? Which iMac do you have (Model/OS)? Which AirPort do you have?

The iMac and Airport are connected via ethernet, no wireless going on, i have a Aluminium 20" iMac 2.4ghz (the new 1) have the new airport too, bought it from the apple store the other day

 

[Makosuke]

There's obviously something drastically wrong if you're having that happen with a wired connection, but as with any network issue pinning down exactly what may be a little tricky.

I'll assume you haven't done anything weird with either router or computer's advanced network settings, so that would leave the following possibilities that I can think of:

Bad network cable; if it works fine on a direct connection, you know that at least one is good, maybe try the other in the same configuration to rule this out.

Weird interaction between the modem and Airport; I haven't seen this myself, but it could happen in theory. What's the model of the modem and who's your ISP?

Airport Base Station is broken.

Something is really wokny with your OS install on the iMac, though I can't imagine what if it works fine on a direct connection.


If it's a newer iMac, you should have an Airport card built in, so another thing to try is connecting via wireless (only) rather than a wired connection; so long as you're not doing file transfers to another wired computer, this should be full speed since your ISP is slower than a wireless connection.

If this works fine, that narrows it down to either a bad ethernet port on the base station or some kind of network weirdness.

If it's the same when connected wirelessly, then that means it's either the modem having trouble talking to the router, the router is funky, or your OS install/settings are weird.


A second thing to try would be to get another computer from your house and connect it (wired) to the Airport; if THAT works fine, then the problem must be with your iMac, and it's got to be some sort of wacky software interaction between the way your Airport is set up and the way your iMac is set up.


For what it's worth, this is very similar to what I'm running at home--I have an older G5 tower and an old G4 server connected to one of the newer (gigabit) Airport Base Stations, and a wireless MacBook Pro, and there wasn't anything tricky about setting it up.