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Old dog guy

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 11, 2016
7
0
1. I have an AirPort Express that is a few years old but seems to work just fine. I get up to 65 Mb download speed . Will I gain any significant increase by getting an AirPort Extreme?
2. My other consideration is that I have an old WD 500GB portable hard drive for backup. I do have a new iMac with a 1TB Fusion drive. Does it make good sense to maybe get the 2TB Time Capsule? I have read about some issues with them getting hot and I'm not sure that I'll ever use the 1TB on the iMac. Thanks for any thoughts.
 
Do you have any other computers or devices that connect to your network that require backup? If not, why not simply use an external drive connected to your computer? There are decent "portable" drives that don't take much space as well as external SSD drives and more.
 
When you say you get up to 65 Mb download speed, are you talking about transfers within your network or are you talking about internet speed? What is the speed you pay for from your provider? 65 is pretty good speed if that's your internet download rate, and if you pay for that speed getting a different router isn't going to change anything.
 
When you say you get up to 65 Mb download speed, are you talking about transfers within your network or are you talking about internet speed? What is the speed you pay for from your provider? 65 is pretty good speed if that's your internet download rate, and if you pay for that speed getting a different router isn't going to change anything.

I'll try to answer both responses. Don't have much of a network so to speak. An iPad Air 2, iPhone 6s Plus, Apple TV 3rd gen. And a wireless printer. Still haven't used all of the 500 MB on the WD portable HD. I consistently get 65MB download speeds. I don't even pay for that much.
Just wondering if it made any sense to get a router with the new Wi-Fi spec because all my stuff is just over 6 months old. Also if it makes sense to then get the Time Capsule, eliminate the old, but functional WD portable HD, while updating the Wi-Fi specs. I can afford pretty much any upgrade I want but don't have to do anything. Maybe an AirPort Extreme and a SSD external HD from someone else?
 
If you're not doing significant transfer between devices, changing the router to a new space will give you relatively minor increases in performance, especially if your download speeds are better than you're paying for. Does most of your content stream over the network from one device to the other or is it web-based?

If you decide to move to the TC or other network-mounted backup/storage, then absolutely an upgraded network would improve your experience with transferring data over the network. Right now, though, if you're primarily looking at streaming off the web as your network traffic, there aren't many home internet connections that will saturate even an 802.11g WiFi network, much less an 802.11n.
 
If you're not doing significant transfer between devices, changing the router to a new space will give you relatively minor increases in performance, especially if your download speeds are better than you're paying for. Does most of your content stream over the network from one device to the other or is it web-based?

If you decide to move to the TC or other network-mounted backup/storage, then absolutely an upgraded network would improve your experience with transferring data over the network. Right now, though, if you're primarily looking at streaming off the web as your network traffic, there aren't many home internet connections that will saturate even an 802.11g WiFi network, much less an 802.11n.

Thanks for the input. Everything works pretty well as is. Just wondering if I were going to see any significant difference by upgrading now. Don't think that I will. If it ain't broke don't fix it, right now. Again, thanks.
 
If your system works and you are happy with it then you are set. If you want improved speed and range, you may want to consider other than Apple's offerings. There has been discussion that typical 802.11ac routers provide better performance than routers that go only up to 802.11n. (ac Routers do a better N than N routers).

Also, if you get a new iMac, it handles 802.11ac. The main advantage that people often overlook on routers such as the ASUS 1900 class and Netgear 1900 class ac routers is that you can easily find out which channels are saturated and switch to a less saturated channel (usually it can be neighbors and their wifi causing 'noise' which impacts your wifi). Some folks that have a router that handles 2.4 and 5 ghrtz simultaneously will set up the 2.4 for ipad, iphone etc. and leave the 5 gig bands for computers and other serious devices. There are many variations on a theme here but that was just one simple example.
 
Thanks, something to keep in mind if things start slowing down. Right now using speediest.net and Ookla I get 65Mbps consistently. Luckily, my neighbors are never home it seems.
 
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