2004–01–29

Airport Extreme and Linksys Wireless problems

If you are lucky enough to be using one of the latest Macs that are compatible with Airport Extreme you may also be unlucky enough to be using a Linksys router such as the BEFW11S4. Many folks are reporting problems with this combination of equipment. It probably depends on your set-up. At my home we’ve had mixed success. No problems connecting to the internet and generally good connections between computers. I know of two other Linksys networks where the computer to computer filesharing, when it involves Airport Extreme, is just unusable. Simply transferring a 1 mb file between an ethernet connected computer and a AE connected computer may take several minutes instead of two seconds which would be normal. A search on Google found this post:

A helpful post in the Apple support forums, Extreme + Linksys BEFW11S4 Problems suggests throttleing the device down to 1–2Mbps, which, while not ideal, gives at least passable performance.

To do this, contect to your router, go to Advanced, choose wireless and set “TX rates” to “1–2 MBps” down from the default “1–2–5.5–11 MBps”. Yay for the internet, and bah humbug for propietary hardware.

This might be useful. I have not had a chance to try it yet. The thread at the Apple Support forum is a long one with lots of information. Apparently this has been a problem for lots of folks.