I recently revived an Imac. The Wifi network card that is uses is a Atheros 9380.
The extender is connected via an ethernet cable.
When the imac is near the Xr500 I can only get speed up to 100Mbps.
If I take the Imac and place it next to the EX7700 the speed is at 250Mbps.
My phone gets 600Mbps next to the router.
Why is there such a speed difference between the router and the extender on the Imac
The Imac is running High Sierra
Thank you
James
it could be a couple things. What band are you connected to when the Imac is running off the XR500? And which band is it connected to when running off the EX7700?
Reason I ask is that 5ghz is significantly faster than 2.4ghz. And they both have band steering. The XR500 runs dumaOS and the EX7700 is running netgear's firmware. Potentially they have different settings for which devices 'needs' to be on the 5ghz band.
When you're using smart connect, the extender or router (depending on which connected to) band steers. That means it moves devices between 2.4ghz and 5ghz as needed.
Have you ever been able to get close to the speeds the phone is getting with the iMac on any other router? It may be that the WiFi card is not strong enough.
@Netduma-Fraser wrote: Have you ever been able to get close to the speeds the phone is getting with the iMac on any other router? It may be that the WiFi card is not strong enough.
The maximum theoretical speed on this card is 300, So 250 is is fine next the the extender.
The trouble was that I was getting just 60 next to the router. For now I have turned the wifi off on the router and I am connecting via the extender and I am getting around 130 so that is a big improvement.
You don't have to turn off the wifi on the router. Just make sure its on a different wifi channel than the extender if the extender is running in AP (access point) mode.
