Airport Extreme Gen 5 Slow Speed NetGear CM700

The Gen5 is getting rather ancient.. but still over ethernet should give you better than 90Mbps.

My recommendation straight up is buy a new decent modern router.. A 8-9 year old router is well and truly past use by.

Here are some details on checking.

As long as the actual ethernet connection at the computer is gigabit.. which you can easily discover via the network utility.. hidden now so just type network utility into search and open it. It shows the link speed at 1Gbit/s which is correct.

I happen to have a Gen5 AE in testing at the moment.. set up in double NAT so let me show you how to test.. you will need another computer connected by gigabit ethernet.

By using this in double NAT.. all packets are passing through the WAN to LAN as if it is standard internet setup.

The standard test software is iperf but this is hard to use.. so a suitable alternative like tamosoft free LAN test software will work great. And is available for Mac, Windows as well as android and iOS.

Here is test with direct ethernet bypassing the Airport to make sure the link is working.. As any connection it bounces around a bit but is managing 950Mbps on download which is about what gigabit will do.

Then I swapped the connection to the Airport. In double NAT this is testing throughput..

IPv6 on.

Then again IPv6 set to link-local only in Airport.. you can see throughput drops a bit but it may still be using IPv6 on local network. (That is what link-local only does).

I will do a test with IPv6 completely turned off. This is bypassing the Airport to get a baseline.

And this is through the airport. The TCP down is in the ballpark Bob referred to .. around 350-380Mbps .. it is a little better on later firmware than earlier testing.. but the upload is a lot better.. as the router is not well balanced between download and upload.

Note tests done from Mac to PC windows.. which may have been downloading updates at the time.. when I went to shut off the machine it wanted to install updates.. this may skew the results a bit. (my internet is only 50Mbps download max so not by much).

If you can possibly run these tests in your setup it will prove the setup .. and if the router is still performing as it should.

If not just buy a new router.

A Gen5 AE is not really good enough for your connection. This is to provide data for later questions.. but I would highly recommend a new router.. testing or no testing.

First check would be to temporarily disconnect the AirPort Extreme from the Netgear modem and connect a computer directly to the modem using the same Ethernet cable that you normally use to connect to the AirPort Extreme.

Run a few speed checks that way and compare the results to the speeds that you are supposed to be receiving from your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

What speed plan are you signed up for with your provider?

What are the results when you run the check outlined above?

If the check above still results in about 90 Mbps speeds, then you have either a modem problem or an Ethernet cable problem at this point. A bad cable will still allow a connection, but speeds will be limited to 100 Mbps or less. Try another Ethernet cable to see if your speed checks will be close to the plan that you are paying for.

If the speeds are still low with another Ethernet cable, then you will need to check with Netgear Support to troubleshoot the modem.

Since you have verified that the modem is working correctly, the next step would be to to reset the AirPort Extreme back to its factory default settings and then set it up again to see if speeds improve.

To reset the AirPort Extreme......

Make sure that it has been powered up for few minutes

Hold in the reset button on the Extreme for 7-8 seconds, then release

Allow a full minute for the AirPort Extreme to restart to a slow blinking amber light status

Set up the AirPort Extreme and check the speeds again on the wired Ethernet connections first, then check WiFi speeds.

If the speeds are still slow on the AirPort Extreme, there is not really much that you can do to improve things. We can change an IPv6 setting from Automatic to Link Local Only, but I doubt that it will help.

Although the AirPort Extreme might have a Gigabit WAN port, the top speed that the AirPort could produce when it was set up as a router was about 300-330 Mbps.

Remember that a 5th Gen AirPort Extreme is now at least 7+ years old and as much as 9+ depending on when the product was placed into service.

The average useful life of the AirPort is about 5 years, so your Extreme is likely showing its age.

Regarding IPv6 to Link-Only, it's already set that way. Should I try setting to something else?

Link Local Only is the best setting to use.

What do you mean by top speed as a router of ~300 Mbps? The gigabit ports couldn't do 1000 Mbps?

As I said, the WAN and LAN ports might be Gigabit capable, but the internal processor inside the AirPort Extreme would only allow speeds of about 300-325 Mbps when the AirPort was configured as a DHCP and NAT router, as yours is. This was confirmed by independent testers like Small Net Builder.

If you need more proof, I can ask some of the other regular posters to this forum who can confirm that what I say is true.

In short, the Gigabit ports could do 1000 Mbps, but the internal processor inside the AirPort Extreme limited speeds severely.

If you check closely, you will see that Apple never provided users with actual WAN to LAN speed specifications. They only mentioned that the ports were Gigabit capable.

If the AirPort Extreme was set up in Bridge Mode......meaning that its routing functions were turned off, it could do 500-600 Mbps that way. But, you can't use the Bridge Mode setting on the AirPort with the type of pure modem that you have.

The 5th Gen was designed 10 years ago. Internet speeds of even 200-300 were rare in those days.

Leaning towards the Orbi RBK50

Mesh is certainly a better solution than a single router and if you can get the Netgear for a good price then it is one of the better mesh models. Newer AX stuff is around but it is still a bit too bleeding edge for most people.

Won't hurt, but also probably won't help.