Be nice to your wireless network

My recent issue with my laptop forced me to try Time Machine over a wireless network to the Airport Extreme N.

This has been working fine, but I wanted to see if I could eek out even better performance.

Thus, I dedicated the Airport Extreme N to a 5ghz N only network. I then set up my older Linksys WRT54G in bridge mode to serve the 802.11b and 802.11g clients.

So far, the results have been fantastic. I don’t have hard numbers, but streaming movies to Apple TV is near instant now. Backing up to Time Machine seems to be doing 10-12MB/second, based on watching the menu.

Small transfers still seem to suffer, but this is not much different than with a local drive filesystem. Large files always have much more throughput than a lot of little files.

Screen Sharing is screaming fast now, with live dragging showing almost no artifacts.

So if you have an Airport Extreme N and are still using older wifi devices (TiVo, PS3, Wii, older computers), consider breaking out an older router and using it as a wireless access point (WAP) and dedicate that fancy router to those clients who can really use it.