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I know speed is likely to be slower over Wi-Fi than ethernet. This is about the consistency or persistence of the connection itself. When I'm plugged into gigabit ethernet, I get a great connection, usually over the speed I pay for with my ISP and < 1% packet loss in an extended (several hours) ping test. When I connect over Wi-Fi, I have tons of trouble with the connection. Skype calls drop and reconnect repeatedly. (Nevermind the jokes about Skype. It happens with FaceTime and others as well.) Connection to our company chat drops. IM programs log out and back in over and over, causing me to miss important messages. And when I do ping tests, I get average ping times over 2 seconds (One run near 8 seconds), with maximums of around 20 seconds.
What could be causing this? Thanks in advance for any guidance you can offer.
Here are details about my setup:
- Cable ISP paying for 30Mbps of service
- Motorola Surfboard cable modem with DOCSIS 3.0 connected to latest generation Airport Extreme Base Station. (Prior, a 2TB Time Capsule.)
- AEBS connected with Cat 5e cable to 24 port ethernet switch.
- All hardware is in my office closet, less than 15′ away from my computer
- Time Capsule plugged into ethernet switch for Time Machine backups
- A few other devices like a printer, TiVo, and AppleTV also connected to the switch.
- 15″ Retina MacBook Pro (First generation, whenever that was. Year and a half ago?)
and things I've tried:
- Replace Time Capsule with new AEBS. Time Capsule is about four years old so this was my first thought.
- Disabled the separate 5Ghz network. Found that my machine was jumping between the two and causing some of the issue, but it persists.
- Moved the AEBS out of the closet. Now there is nothing but air between my computer and the AEBS.
- Time Capsule: Made sure to disable wireless network and put it in bridge mode.
Here's a gist of wireless results, which I will duplicate here:
--- google.com ping statistics ---
228 packets transmitted, 228 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 39.070/1937.931/19344.446/3880.397 ms
I'm reticent to say it's solved lest the RF gods smite me, but changing from channel 11, which a few other networks in my neighborhood were using, to channel 3 seems to have helped. Thanks! – jxpx777 – 2014-02-28T19:16:43.093
In the end, it seems the issue was that my machine was switching back and forth between 2.4GHz and 5GHz. I created a separate 5GHz SSID and made all my devices forget about the 2.4GHz one. I'm going to add some additional access points to increase the coverage. – jxpx777 – 2014-03-05T19:55:33.617