How can I increase/improve Airport Express speed?

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How can I increase/improve Airport Express speed?

We have a cable modem which, when plugged directly into our Macbook Pros, consistently gets 150+MBps; however, when we use our latest generation Airport Extreme on 5G, we get speeds around 50-60MBps. On the other band we get around 20MBps. Our laptops are about 8 feet from the router and there is no block- no walls, no electrical cords around it, and it's direct line of sight from the computer. The channel selection is set to automatic.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time!!!

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch,Early 2015), OS X El Capitan (10.11.3)

Posted on Feb 3, 2016 7:31 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 3, 2016 7:51 AM in response to sethswk

How can I increase/improve AirPort Express speed?

The title of your post suggests that you have an AirPort Express.

when we use our latest generation Airport Extreme on 5G

The information in your post suggests that you have an AirPort Extreme.

There is a huge difference between the AirPort Express and AirPort Extreme, so it would be helpful if you could confirm on which product that you might have.

Not a big deal......but you are expressing speeds in MBps.....which is MegaBytes per second, when Internet speed readings are expressed by just about all ISPs in Mbps.....Megabits per second. One expression is 8 times the speed of the other.

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Answer 2

sethswk Author

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Feb 3, 2016 9:09 PM in response to Bob Timmons

Thanks for writing back and sorry for the confusion I caused. The speeds I meant were Mbps and the AirPort we have is the AirPort Express.

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Answer 3

Feb 4, 2016 6:08 AM in response to sethswk

Thanks for the clarification, the speeds that you are receiving would be normal for an AirPort Express.

There are several reasons for this. One of them is that the AirPort Express uses only 100 Mbps Ethernet ports, so the theoretical maximum speed that the AirPort Express can deliver would be 100 Mbps.

In practice, the AirPort Express is a slowpoke. Mine does, on average, about 30-40 Mbps on a 100 Mbps Internet connection.

Your Macs have Gigabit Ethernet ports....1,000 Mbps.....so they will be able to handle just about any type of wired connection that you could imagine.

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