Hi; I wonder if anybody has made a similar transition to what I'm thinking about…and if so was there any increase in overall throughput.
My wife and I live in an RV and are thus dependent on either wifi from the campground or our Verizon air card for external internet access. I can't really do anything about that but most of our usage is internally between our iPhone 4's (not 4s), two original iPads, and two MBP (one Retina and one unibody) My current network uses a WiFi Ranger as the router and this can't really be easily changed as it provides the ability to failover between wifi and the air card as required. The WiFi Ranger has 10/100 ethernet. I currently have a 10/100 Linksys switch downstream of the WiFi Ranger and all internal devices are hooked up to it. These include an Intel Mac Mini (file server) with gigabit ethernet and an original Airport Extreme 802.11n First Generation that only has 10/100 ethernet connections. The Airport is in bridge mode with the router set as it's gateway. The two iPhone 4, two original iPads, and two MBPs all connect via the Airport which is set in 802.11n (802.11b/g compatible) mode. I did a speed check for file transfer from one of the MBPs to the Mini and throughput is about 9.8 MB/sec…this compares pretty well with the 12.5 MB/sec maximum for a 10/100 switch; so clearly I'm being limited by the switches and not by the wifi throughput. I'm considering replacing the existing Airport with the latest version which includes gigabit ethernet dual band (since the iPhones only do 2.4 GHz and I don't know whether the iPad 1's do 2.4 only or have 5 GHz as well)…along with this I would replace the switch with a gigabit switch. My thinking is that this would give us much better throughput between the MBPs and the server (Time Machine takes forever backing up to the Mini); obviously external connectivity won't be helped by this but that's fixed depending on how we're connecting at a particular parking spot. I have a couple of questions about this. As a long time Mac Consultant I'm surprised that I never actually did this upgrade for any of my clients before we went on the road full time…but I didn't…I'm not adverse to spending money if it will help but would hate to spend 300 bucks upgrading only to find out it doesn't make any difference. 1. Am I likely to see significantly better throughput internally to our LAN if I make the above changes or am I just fighting physics? 2. Does the 10/100 router really make any difference for internal communications? I'm thinking no since all of the internal connections are via Bonjour anyway and since the gigabit switch that everything is connected to would handle all of the internal traffic, only going to the port connected to the router if it's an external internet request. 3. If my idea won't really give me any better service; is there anything else I can do to improve performance? I suppose I could switch the Airport to n only mode at 2.4 GHz but I don't think the b/g compatible mode really affects throughput, or does it? My wife also has a g only Dell box she uses for her part time job, but I can always turn on the g wifi in the WiFi Ranger and have two internal networks, the Airport for all of the Apple devices at n speed and the WiFi Ranger at g speed for the Windows machine. 4. If I do the dual wifi arrangement in 3 above; is there any way to keep all of my Apple devices from seeing the g network from the WiFI Ranger? The only way I can think of is to turn SSID broadcast off and then manually put the SSID of the network into the Dell instead of letting it automatically acquire. Essentially what I'm trying to do is improve internal throughput for Time Machine backups and file opening/saving to the Mini file server; with the side benefit of making sure that all external internet traffic is limited by the external link connection speed and not by anything internal to my LAN. The 10/100 in the WiFi Ranger is clearly enough to keep up with anything on the internet end I might be connected to. Thanks for any suggestions you can offer. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list [email protected] http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
