Airport Extreme to Time Capsule LAN Gigabit Connection Speed?

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steveuk71 Author

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Airport Extreme to Time Capsule LAN Gigabit Connection Speed?

I have the following:

Time Capsule 802.11n (4th Generation) setup as my Primary Router

I have extended the network to another room using physical Cat5e cable connection to the following:

AirPort Extreme 802.11n (5th Generation)

All is working great with no complaints, but my question is how do I know the Airport Extreme is actually connecting to the Time Capsule at Gigabit speed over the LAN cable? There seems to be nowhere in the Airport Utility to show the LAN / cabled connection speeds?

I have proven the cabling is fine by connecting my Macbook at the intended AirPort Extreme location and it does show auto negotiated to Gigabit speed connection back to the Time Capsule. So no reason to doubt that the Airport Extreme is also connecting at Gigabit using same cable - it would just be nice to see it in writing somewhere!

Posted on Jan 15, 2013 12:10 PM

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steveuk71 Author

Level 1

1 points

Jan 15, 2013 1:32 PM in response to steveuk71

Think I answerred my own question, found this good article:

http://www.macworld.co.uk/macsoftware/masterclass/?articleid=414

Connected my Macbook via cable to Airport Extreme (Network Utility on Mac) showed Gigabit Connection. I also disable Wireless on Macbook to ensure LAN cable was being used!

The Airport Extreme is connected by cable to Time Capsule.

I did some rough timings of copied files from the Macbook to the Time Capsule (via Airport Extreme) and with my calculations using link above was getting transfer rates between 300 and 400 Megabits per second. So clearly shows connection all the way through is higher than theoretical maximum 100T (100 Megabits per second), so connection must be 1000T Gigabit between Airport Extreme and Time Capsule. I guess the disk speeds are the limiting factor here and why I am not seeing closer to the theoretical maximum of 1000 Megabits per second).

So good news, but it would be nice if the Aiport Utility could show the actual Airport LAN connection speeds like Network Utility does on the Macbook.

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