2 airport extremes, PC and MBP...

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Level 1

8 points

2 airport extremes, PC and MBP...

Hello all... Thaks in advance for al your help.. I have 2 airport extremes throughout my house, and the wifi seems to work pretty good. I have a desktop PC hard wired from a an 8 port switch which in turn in hard wired to one of the expresses. My pc can not detect airport utilities (keep in mind, hardwired)... also, I want to add an external hard drive so we can stream movies on the i pad and such. Would it matter which of the 2 airport extremes I place the external hard drive onto?? Thanks.. Richard

MacBook Pro, OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.5), PC with Win7.. and a buch of apple

Posted on Dec 16, 2013 8:47 PM

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Answer 1

Tesserax

Level 10

148,453 points

Dec 16, 2013 9:03 PM in response to LOST@SEA

I have 2 airport extremes throughout my house, and the wifi seems to work pretty good.

Are these two AirPort Extreme base stations connected by Ethernet or via a wireless connection? Are they configured for an extended or roaming type network?

I have a desktop PC hard wired from a an 8 port switch which in turn in hard wired to one of the expresses.

Did you mean to say "Extreme" instead of "Express" here? If so, which of the two Extreme base stations is the Ethernet Switch connected to? The Extreme connected to the Internet modem or the other one?

also, I want to add an external hard drive so we can stream movies on the i pad and such.

Is your goal to stream the movie from the external hard drive to the iPad?

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Answer 2

LOST@SEA Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 16, 2013 9:47 PM in response to Tesserax

Thanks for the response Tesserax... The 2 Airport Extremes.. are hard wired to each other...via an ethernet cable up in the attic... The set up is...

1.. Coaxle cable coming from attic to ATT u verse gateway... one port of the gateway (ethernet) to one Airport Extreme....

2.. Airport Extreme hardwired to 8 port switch... (in one port).... second port to second airport extreme.....

third port on airport extreme to powerline ethernet port to run my AVR,Blueray with netflix, and apple tv in

living room.... (by the way, all this gear is in my front room, or home office.... my pc is hard wired from

one of the the ports on th 8 port switch....

3.. The second airport extreme is in the laundry room right by the garage... wife did not want it visible... :<(

and yes, the ultimate goal is to stream movies from the external hard drive to the i pads, phones, or anything else connected to the network..... Thanks for your time and help....

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Answer 3

Tesserax

Level 10

148,453 points

Dec 17, 2013 4:06 PM in response to LOST@SEA

Ok thanks for providing the network details. I believe I understand your configuration now. As far as the Extreme base station they should all be good with them all interconnected by Ethernet. The only issue I see is the Extreme in the laundry room as far as it signal quality. If there are large metal boxes (washer & dryer) these are not going to let the Wi-Fi signal travel very far and could case some of the signal to "echo" back towards the base station.

However before making any changes it would be a good idea to establish a signal quality baseline of your existing setup. From there we can make some suggested changes to see if any help improve the overall bandwidth for streaming.

The other area we will look into will be data transfer rates between some of your network equipment to see where there may be some bottlenecks.

Let's stay with signal quality for now. What we are going to want to measure is the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) at various locations where you will use network clients for either or both Internet access and for streaming.

Check out the following AirPort User Tip for details on how to take these measurements. The will work best if yoiu have a laptop. The goal is to get a SNR reading of 25+ dB at each of these locations. This will tell us that you are getting decent siqnal quality at each of the locations that do. Please post back your results.

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