AirPort Extreme setup in bridge mode

Check your wireless.. it should be single band 2.4ghz.. let me show you how slow that is..

A wired connection to it gives me typical speeds of around 500mbps (up and down) while wireless is typically 10% of that!

Sorry but that is exactly right.

Hold down the option key and click the wireless fan in the top right menu.

This is my computer linked to 2.4ghz channel 1 and Tx rate is 217mbps This is the absolute top speed possible on a Mac with AC wireless card.. not sure about the newest AX. Any Mac to a Gen2 Airport you might be lucky to achieve 130 and if signal is poor might be <100Mbps.

To find the actual speed you must divide the link speed by 2. That means for a Tx rate of 217mbps I should get around 100mbps actual top speed.

So here is a test copy a file to fast NAS. (My internet is only 50Mbps.. Australia .. Third world country)

So my data speed is peaking at around 5.4MB/s x8 to get bits.. 43Mbps real world copy. Right around your speed on old Time Capsule 2.4ghz.

Now lets try that on AC wireless at 5ghz..

Link speed is now 878Mbps

133MB/s x8 to bits.. = 1064Mbps.. This is burst speed and not sustainable.. I would guess it will drop back to 600Mbps or thereabouts.

So problem

You are forced to use 2.4ghz due to age and poor wireless on the Gen2 AE.

Solution .. Buy AC or AX wireless router. NOW.

I note that my link speed is far lower than yours, which presumably reflects a setting somewhere?

No, since there are no settings that would affect link speed on either the AirPort router or a WiFi device.

Please consider the advice that you have received from LaPastenague:

Buy AC or AX wireless router. NOW.

The reason for this is that Apple considers the 2nd Gen AirPort Extreme as obsolete. If you contact Apple for support, they will not help you.......even if you are willing to pay them.

I don’t understand why I can’t connect the Nokia to the AE’s WAN port!

Does connectivity light on the port turn on when you plug it into the Nokia?

Port zapped is possibility. Ethernet ports can get hit by high voltage spikes down line through modem. Anyway it makes no difference in this usage.. The Wan port is assigned to LAN when the AE is bridged so then any LAN port will work.

If it bothers you either buy a switch or a replacement AE.. like a much newer one.

The second problem is speed. Compared with wired connections to the Extreme, which are fast, wireless connections are dog slow.

The Gen2 AE which is dual band but not simultaneous is ancient and since you are forced to use 2.4ghz it is definitely going to be slow as old treacle flowing uphill in winter. Again buy a newer one.. for cheap the last of the flat models Gen5 A1408 is usually around $40 on eBay but I have seen them down to about half that. Or the AC model A1521 which seem to be readily available now are around $60-70 for cheapest examples.

Wireless function on the Nokia is switched off.

Why.. so you can kneecap yourself with ancient technology? Time to move into the Next Age of wifi.. wifi6. Plenty of examples available now for cheap enough if your nokia is too far away or something.

The useful life of most routers designed for home use is about 6-7 years on average. A 2nd Generation AirPort Extreme is at least 12 years old and as much as 14+ depending on when it was placed into service, so there is that to consider.

All ports behave the same.....as LAN ports.......when the AirPort is set up in Bridge Mode, so it does not matter which port that you use with the Nokia modem/router.

If you cannot connect to the WAN port on the AirPort, the WAN port is defective. Simply connect to one of the other Ethernet ports, as there would be no advantage to connecting to the WAN port....even if was functional.

As far as the WiFi speed is concerned on the AirPort Extreme, it may be a case of it is what it is due to age. How do the WiFi speeds compare to the the Ethernet speed on the Extreme?

In other words, if you connect your Mac or other device to one of the other Ethernet ports on the Extreme what speed do you see when you run an Internet connection speed check using a site like www.speedtest.net?

What kind of WiFi speed do you see when you connect using WiFi with the same site?

so I guess there must be something wrong with the WAN.

It has failed.

but wireless is a fraction of that (typically 10% or so, around 50mbps with me sitting on the AE).

If you are receiving the same speeds with other WiFi devices as well, the wireless radio on the AE is failing. Expect the speeds to slow down even more.

I've also substituted the AE with a newish Linksys router running DD-WRT software that I've also set up as a mixed network. It should be a significant upgrade and should theoretically have better band steering than the old AE and indeed,

I used to be a firm believer in 3rd party firmware ... way way back.. In the days of the magnificent, WRT54G.

Since AC chipset manufacturers treat wireless drivers as commercial in confidence and never release source code to the firmware people. End result.. poor wireless in vast majority of wireless router beyond N wireless.

I use an Asus RT-AC88U and lots of others for testing but the Asus has one of the best wifi configurations.

What I see is your 5ghz is using only 20mhz bandwidth.. that restricts it to max speed of 300Mbps and using DFS channel plus fairly poor signal has reduced link speed to 54Mbps.. very very poor.

You can try to force it to 40mhz but I doubt it will work.

You need modern AC or AX on supplied firmware.. forget third party now.

Europe also is very restrictive.. just so you know.. US or Aus where I am use much more spectrum for wifi.

End result.. poor wireless in vast majority of wireless router beyond N wireless.

Just to elucidate further; this is 3rd party firmware issue. Not with main manufacturer who have access to the source code and more. A lot of fine tuning goes on in the better brand routers.. with secret info held in nvram giving exact values for a whole bunch of variables not visible easily to even the most ardent hacker.

WRT1900ACS

The main chipset on these is Marvel from memory. I have had a couple of routers in that series, WRT1200 and WRT3200.. but neither of them had great wireless. I also flashed it to third party.. OpenWRT from memory, since Linksys firmware is woeful but wifi still performed poorly.. it had huge latency even if the speed of connection was OK.. that slowed things down a lot.

Apple stuff is generally broadcom chipset and it is worthwhile buying broadcom chipset routers because they definitely seem to work better.