About 9 months ago I picked up the WRT150N Linksys Wireless Router. I’ve used Linksys products before (mainly the WRT54G) and they always performed fairly well. I have, since upgrading to Macs, had nothing but problems with that router and my wireless network in general. And to be honest, that could be just as much Mac’s fault as it is the Linksys router.
Last night I struggled to figure out why the videos I was trying to stream to my AppleTV kept stuttering while playing. I fired up VLC on my MacBook Pro, and it wasn’t much better. I ended up doing a few wireless test of my network using SCP to copy files between machines, and the best speed I could get was around 3MB/s, which is fairly pathetic for a wireless N network. I messed with as many settings on my router as I could, but I just couldn’t squeeze any more juice out of it.
I just got back from Future Shop, where I bought a new Airport Extreme Wireless N - Gigabit Ethernet Router. Installation was actually fairly simple once I figured out that you need a special software application to configure it as opposed to the standard router web interfaces that most routers have.
Based on a recommendation Dale gave me, I immediately set it up as Wireless N in the 5GHz wide mode. Right away I noticed that everything on my network seemed a bit snappier. I repeated the tests I did last night, and the wireless throughput on the network is around 13.3MB/s now, which is about where I thought it should be.
So right now I’m watching a rip I did of Vanilla Sky I did last night on my AppleTV. No stutters after about 15 minutes, so I think I’m good to go.
I’ve been having issues with my wireless AP as well for the past little while. Granted - it is almost certainly not the fault of the AP, but rather issues with my MacBook, and I’m frustrated as hell about it. Other people have reported similar problems with wifi stability on their MBs and MBPs, and while 10.5.3 was supposed to address these issues, so far I’ve seen zero improvement. Anyways, I’ve read that the issues miraculously disappear if you use an Apple AP and so I’m considering going that route. Sucks that I’d have to shell out the $$ for it though. Actually, if I’m going to do it, I guess my best bet would be to pick up a time capsule instead of an airport extreme…
I looked briefly at a time capsule too, but you can slap on your own external USB drive to the Airport Extreme, and Time Machine will work with it. I think that’s a cheaper route, unless there’s something I don’t quite get about Time Capsule.
The only difference is that Time Capsule works with Time Machine….wheras adding an external to the Extreme isn’t officially supported…it does work though but it can be flaky. Neither are very fast options anyways….
The nice thing about Time Capsule though is that it’s one less thing (an external drive that is) sucking power since it’s built in…go green and all that.
In my previous comment I meant that using an external drive that is connected to the Airport Extreme isn’t really supported for Time Machine. Apple has been flip flopping on it since the beta of Leopard.
Good points John thanks. I’ve been thinking that I need a backup solution for my MacBook (I’ve got an external firewire drive connected to the iMac for Time Machine already) and I figured a 500 GB Time Capsule would be a relatively cheap option ($300 through EPP) that would also possibly get me out of my wifi stability hell. Perhaps I should price out an Airport Extreme though since I already have a 1 TB external drive (the one I’m using for the iMac backups). I’m assuming it’s possible, but can you use the same drive for backups from multiple machines?
Yes Kevin you can use one drive for multiple computer backups…Time Machine creates separate files/folders for each machine backup. I’ve got 4 machines cohabitating nicely at home on the same setup.