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Airport Extreme (5th gen) throttling speed from modem

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Patrick Barry

New Around Here
I can't figure out what's going on with my 2012 5th gen Apple Airport Extreme (AAE). It's supposed to be capable of gigabit networking speeds, though it appears to be capping my cable internet at the 100 Mbps mark.

Here's what I've found. My ISP is a 200 Mbps plan from Time Warner (Austin, TX). I have a new SMC modem that's on their approved list for my speeds, and when my 2012 iMac is wired directly to the modem on CAT6, I get 225 Mbps down via speedtest.net. Insert the AAE as the router, and the wired speed test to my iMac gets cut to 93 Mbps. If I'm in good range of the AAE, I can get the same speeds over wifi to my n and ac devices. I've tinkered with the settings in Airport Utility, but nothing affects my speeds. For instance, I've disabled wifi on the router and tested with only the iMac connected, I've assigned static IP to the Mac, and I've even rolled the firmware back from 7.6.4 to 7.6.3 to 7.6.1. I haven't tried 7.6 or 7.5.2 yet, but I think I will give it a shot.

Next, I tried testing LAN transfer speeds using a free app called LAN_SpeedTest. I connected a MacBook Air to the AAE using a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter, and writing a 200 MB packet from the iMac to MacBook. The read time was ~750 Mbps, that confirms gigabit speeds over LAN?

I had read online someone experiencing similar issue and inserted a gigabit switch before the AAE, which activated those speeds. I tried the same tactic, but it's still capped at 93 Mbps.

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated. I would like to get this operating at the speeds that are actually coming into my house. Perhaps it's a hardware issue? I've spoken to Apple support on the phone and we did a factory reset, which provided no improvement. Not sure if they will help me if I bring it in, but I'd be willing to give that a shot as well.
 
When you say 5th Gen, you mean the last iteration of the flat square one, correct? I'm assuming this as you mention 7.6.x as the firmware...

That one actually does max out about about 100Mbps on the WAN port - single core Marvell Kirkwood processor is what holds it back - it's got plenty of capacity behind the firewall on the LAN/WLAN side, but the WAN port is a limiting factor...

The 6th Gen Airport Extreme (802.11ac) does better with the Dual Core Broadcom chipset - ARMv7 vs. ARMv5 on the Kirkwood, and the network stack is improved in the 7.7x releases which only support the 802.11ac devices.
 
Yes, that's the model I'm referring to. I'm planning to move this guy to Access Point privileges (via power line) and add a newer AAE as the main router. Is there a way to make it an AP using the LAN plugs, or do I have to plug it in via the (slower?) WAN outlet?
 
Yes, that's the model I'm referring to. I'm planning to move this guy to Access Point privileges (via power line) and add a newer AAE as the main router. Is there a way to make it an AP using the LAN plugs, or do I have to plug it in via the (slower?) WAN outlet?

The WAN port is the same speed as the LAN ports when the Airport is in bridge mode - the performance hit is in the firmware doing NAT...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204617
 

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