Wifi speed Airbook 2014

Question

Wifi speed Airbook 2014

The Wi-Fi of my Macbook Air 13-inch, early 2014, is much slower than it should be. According to its system information the hardware supports PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac. My internet provider gives me 250 Mbps download speed, and my Wi-Fi router does give that rate to another computer. But the Macbook Air is stuck at about 75 MBps, although the hardware should give much more than that.

I would like to ask Apple itself for an explanation and a possible solution, but on its support site I only find telephone support, which I have not found very helpful in the past.

MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Posted on Dec 14, 2016 5:02 PM

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Answer 1

dwb

Level 7

33,326 points

Dec 15, 2016 6:13 AM in response to wolfgangberberich

If you haven't done so, move around the house and change orientation - face the north wall and test the face the west wall and test. When my wife got her first notebook we were amazed that we could sit side by side (separated by an end table) and my speeds were nearly double hers. I took her computer to look at it and suddenly her speeds matched mine. Long story short: the router was in the basement just beneath us but her chair was directly over a metal air return duct. I moved the router 5 feet and we were getting the same speeds. Maybe this has nothing to do with your problem but it is worth a quick test.

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Answer 2

Dec 15, 2016 2:25 PM in response to dwb

The router is brand new, but just in case, I switched it off for a while, turned it back on, changed its orientation, and tried again at a distance of 0.5 meters, with only air between, as before. Now I get about 80 Mbps.

Apple, if you are reading this, can you please tell me which maximal speed the hardware is meant to have?

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Answer 3

Dec 17, 2016 7:12 PM in response to wolfgangberberich

I finally solved the problem myself. Using this tip:

http://osxdaily.com/2011/06/15/get-detailed-wifi-info-from-the-menu-bar/

I saw that the airbook connected by 2.4 GHz, the other computer by 5 GHz. Thinking how I might force the airbook to use the GHz band, I found that on the admin page of my wireless router, I could switch off the 2.4 GHz band. After doing that the airbook connects by 5GHz and has approximately the same effective speed.

Conclusion: The airbook does not automatically use the faster 5GHz band, as I implicitly expected. I might have solved the problem sooner, if I had had clearer specifications from Apple.

Thanks to everybody who helped me.

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