FiOS Quantum Internet & Airport Express

[Jony Mac]

I recently upgraded to the Verizon FiOS Quantum service 75/75 speeds. Verizon had shipped me the new quantum router but I already had two Airport Expresses. I have my main Airport Express base station connected to the FiOS Lan port and into the WAN port on my Airport Express. I did this along with Double Natting so my Aiport network would allow me to add the Guest Wireless feature. The second Airport Express is joined as a client so I can hard wire a PS3 that only has G wifi speeds.


When I perform speed tests connected to my Airport I get ~50 down and ~30 up. However if I enable wireless on the Fios Gateway I can get speeds around ~80 down ~45 up.

My question is does the Airport Express routers just not have enough power to handle higher download speeds. Is double natting messing anything up? Should I ditch the Airports and just use the FiOS router?

 

[Jony Mac]

Im still stumped. I did more tests last night and simply using the FiOS router gets me 80 down and 40-50 up. I guess Airport Express is not that great for these higher speeds. Shame I have two that I cant use now.

 

[Altemose]

Im still stumped. I did more tests last night and simply using the FiOS router gets me 80 down and 40-50 up. I guess Airport Express is not that great for these higher speeds. Shame I have two that I cant use now.

What AirPort Extreme do you have? The Express, if connected via Ethernet, is capable of 100 Mbps.

 

[Jony Mac]

I have two 2012 Airport Expresses. I think the issue is I'm wirelessly extending the network.

I reset both to defaults yesterday and only hooked up one. The speeds I got on Speedtest.net had been 83 down 63 up on wireless. It stays this way until I bring back the 2nd airport with it wirelessly extended.

I suppose the additional overhead of wifi is causing the speed loss.

 

[Altemose]

I suppose the additional overhead of wifi is causing the speed loss.

Theoretically, the extending AirPort will only cause a bandwidth loss to clients connected to it and not the main AirPort.

 

[Jony Mac]

I just remembered I had the guest network enabled. Does this cause any speed loss?

 

[Altemose]

I just remembered I had the guest network enabled. Does this cause any speed loss?

No. Enabling it does not affect the main network. Now if you overload the AP on either network then the effects will show on both networks. For instance, if you have 10 light bandwidth clients on the main network and and 5 bandwidth pigs on the guest then both would suffer as the AP is struggling.

 

[Jony Mac]

I did not have any guests connected during any of the testing. I had two Macs, 2 iPads, 2, AppleTVs, 1 iPhone, and a PS3 connected using ethernet to my 2nd Airport Express which was wirelessly extended to the primary. At this time none of the other devices had been streaming or downloading anything heavy.


Perhaps someone can help me with my setup. I'd like to use both my Airports as its a waste of money if I cant. What is the best way for me to have one Airport Express as my primary, and have a 2nd Airport Wirelessly Extend the network. Because of multiple floors I can't run Ethernet without making an entire mess and it wont go over well.

 

[waw74]

Because of multiple floors I can't run Ethernet without making an entire mess and it wont go over well.

People have had good luck with power line networking as it takes the strain off your wireless

i don't have an express, but I've seen comments on here that they aren't the fastest.

you can also take the modem/internet out of the equation and test the speed of your network by using black magic disk speed test and pointing it at a shared folder on your other mac. to test how fast you can share files over your network

 

[mmomega]

What AirPort Extreme do you have? The Express, if connected via Ethernet, is capable of 100 Mbps.

My internet connection is 100Mbps down and I have a newer model Express in my bedroom just to extend coverage and my MBA will pull 98-100Mbps easily connected to the express

 

[mmomega]

I did not have any guests connected during any of the testing. I had two Macs, 2 iPads, 2, AppleTVs, 1 iPhone, and a PS3 connected using ethernet to my 2nd Airport Express which was wirelessly extended to the primary. At this time none of the other devices had been streaming or downloading anything heavy.


Perhaps someone can help me with my setup. I'd like to use both my Airports as its a waste of money if I cant. What is the best way for me to have one Airport Express as my primary, and have a 2nd Airport Wirelessly Extend the network. Because of multiple floors I can't run Ethernet without making an entire mess and it wont go over well.

Wirelessly extending is a nice convenience but can also hurt depending on how far apart your devices are from each other.
To get THE BEST performance out of 3 Airport Express's you'd need modem first if it didn't have ethernet ports, then a small switch with 6-8 ports probably then hardwire the Express's.

I'm posting a fairly basic diagram to hopefully be able to help explain.


It sometimes gets confusing because you could be at your 3rd Airport Express and your laptop may be connecting to that 3rd Airport Express at 100Mbps but that is the WiFi network directly beside the 3rd Express but that doesn't mean you are getting 100Mbps of internet related bandwidth.

I had an instructor that put it into this example.
You start with a 8 lane highway and it is carrying 100 cars on it, well the lanes get less and less over range so near the end of that highway you are down to carrying 25 cars. Now you come to another 8 lane highway but you still only have the same 25 cars and after a while those cars drop off the road and you hit another 8 lane highway and now you have 5 cars on it.
The highways represent the connection to your WiFi access point and the cars being your internet bandwidth.
You can always increase the lanes for traffic (by adding extenders) but you don't always get more cars on the road(internet bandwidth). The only way to better keep high bandwidth would be to hardwire all the Express's. Thus for sake of the example, create a super highway loop where the lanes didn't decrease, at least not within your area of use.

I probably thoroughly confused anyone reading this but somehow it helped me grasp it better.

 

[Truefan31]

I'm curious if u need all those airport expresses. The quantum router is a dual band ac wifi unit with guest networking built in.

 

[Jony Mac]

I've had the two Airport Expresses for a little bit of time. The first was prior to getting the FiOS Quantum upgrade. I started using the 2nd one to add an extended connection as the Wifi was weaker on my outside deck. The other reason I liked having these was the Airplay function to stream music to speakers throughout the house.

I tested more with it yesterday and I can see the FiOS router does get better range and speed than the AirPort. It would be nice to find a way to use the existing Airport Expresses, if nothing more than a way to stream music.

 

[aristobrat]

I tested more with it yesterday and I can see the FiOS router does get better range and speed than the AirPort.

Not sure if any of your wireless devices use 802.11ac (like the latest iPhones), but if so, using the FiOS router (since it supports 802.11ac) should increase the maximum Wi-Fi speed of those devices.

I upgraded to Cox's Gigablast (1Gb/1Gb) last weekend, and it came with a "free" Netgear router. As much as I didn't want to use it, the maximum speeds using exiting router (a last-gen Time Capsule) were around 500mpbs to wired computers, and in the low 100s on my iPhone 6.

Switching to the Cox Netgear router, I got 900s to the wired computers, and 200s (max 267) on my iPhone 6.

The problem with the Netgear was that it didn't allow IPSEC pass-thru, which meant my roommate (who works from home) couldn't connect to his work. Ending up having to buy a current-gen Airport Extreme, which performed just as well as the Cox Netgear router did, plus allowed IPSEC pass-thru.

 

[Altemose]

I tested more with it yesterday and I can see the FiOS router does get better range and speed than the AirPort. It would be nice to find a way to use the existing Airport Expresses, if nothing more than a way to stream music.

You can of course have the Expresses join the network created by the FiOS router and use them as basic AirPlay devices or Ethernet adapters.