Awful Time Capsule wifi performance

I’ve been having a number of weird performance issues in the last month or so and I’ve finally attributed them to the Time Capsule.

My friend Erick mentioned that he had just upped his Comcast speed to DOSCIS 3 and was getting 45mbps down, so I did the same.

On ethernet, I would get the full 45mbps down and 8mbps up. On wifi, I was getting 2.2mbps down, 5mbps down, 15, etc.

My setup is as following:

Cable Modem->Time Capsule->Switch->Airport Extreme

The Time Capsule is a 5ghz N only network. The Extreme is a 2.4ghz N/B/G network with a different SSID, used for friends and older G only devices.

I ran a battery of tests, including:

Downgrading to 7.3.1 firmware

Setting multicast to 24mbps

Fully resetting the time capsule

Turning off WPA

This got the capsule up to 20mbps consistently. Then on a lark, I connected to my “slower” Extreme and VOILA! (for michael) I was getting 37-40mbps per second!

So next I:

Changed the wireless settings on the capsule to match the extreme (but not changing the SSID of course)

Removed the extreme from the equation and moved the capsule to the exact same location in the office as the extreme

Upgraded back to 7.3.2, re-try everything

Tried with a Santa Rosa MacBook Pro as well as my Late 2008 MacBook Pro

Nothing helped, exactly the same 20/37 disparity. By this point I think I can safely say something is going with the time capsule’s wifi performance.

In the end, I swapped SSIDs, so the “slower” devices are connecting to the capsule, and my faster devices are talking to the extreme.

Crazy. Time to file a bug with Apple. You’d think they could get this right by now!