Lee, Thankyou for your reply. The setup info for my situation is: Insight cable modem to Airport Extreme base station. It is located as close to the middle of my house to be as equally spaced between my two macs, one is a cube, which uses the older airport card, running OS 10.3.9, and the other is a gooseneck iMac, that has the newer airport card, that is running 10.4.4. I have the latest software and firmware for the ABS. My main question is, why is the speed of my connection so inconsistent? At night when you would expect the traffic load to be high, it is almost like going back to dialup performance ( anywere from 250 to 500 Kb ) In the morning it is much better, ( from 1.5Mb to 2.5Mb ). I am using 3 different sites to get these numbers, Cnet, Bandwidthplace, and Toast.Net. These numbers are the same for both macs, and I am trying to figure this out, because if I was having a equipment problem, I would think that the speed would be the same at all times. Maybe I need a tech from Insight to come out and test the signal at my house, but again, wouldn't it be equally bad from morning to night? Thanks again for your help, Any other opinions would be appreciated. Mike
On Jan 16, 2006, at 11:46 AM, Lee Larson wrote: > On Jan 16, 2006, at 10:10 AM, Michael Robertson asked: > >> A general question about connection speed. Is it right to assume >> that you will sacrifice some speed to have a wireless setup, or >> should it be the same as a directly connected to the cable modem >> setup? > > There are several different flavors of wireless. On the Mac, the > two you're likely to see are 802.11b and 802.11g. The original, > older AirPort wireless is 802.11b and its top rated speed is 11 Mb/ > s. The newer AirPort Express system uses 802.11g and has a top > speed of 54 Mb/s. You'll never actually get the highest rated speed > out of either one unless you're sitting right next to the antenna. > > Either one is much faster than anything that'll come out of your > cable modem because the rarely does anything come out of the cable > faster than 3.5 Mb/s. > >> Also, I think I read somewere that DSL service is not as effected >> by the amount of traffic as cable modem service is, to cause a >> speed dropoff during high traffic times? > > This is what the DSL providers would like you to think. They like > to claim that with DSL you're getting one wire straight to your > house while with cable you're sharing a wire with your neighbors. > But, when you look at it, this doesn't really hold up. With DSL the > signal is sent over a copper pair to your house from the switching > station and the switching station is shared by all your neighbors. > With cable, you share the bandwidth of a fiber optic line that has > much more bandwidth than the copper pair. > > The reality is that the DSL is being run at about the the limits of > the copper pair, while the cable company is actually capping the > bandwidth below what the fiber can support. > > I gave a talk about this at one of the Louisville Computer Society > meetings a while back and to prepare I did experiments with cable > and DSL at several different locations. The numbers and the > subjective feeling both led to my conclusion that cable is faster. > I could dig out the numbers, but the testing should probably be > redone because both Bell South and Insight have changed their > advertising claims during the last year. > > In the end, there's not much difference between them for the > average user because most of the time you're waiting for the > Internet either way. I have a connection in my office at UofL > that's much faster than either cable or DSL and there's really not > much difference in Web surfing and email between my office and my > cable connection at home. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060116/3fe9ef50/attachment.html
