My wireless Mac and wired PC transfer to each other at 2.5 MB/s. Can I speed this up any?

October 21, 2004 7:48 AM

I've got a network in my home - one PC, connected by wire to the router, and one Apple, connected by an Airport card (which I believe is 802.11G). The fastest speed I can get transferring files from one to the other is 2.5MB/s, which seems slow. Am I right, or is this standard?
posted by ascullion to computers & internet (4 comments total)

Well, it will depend on if it's both 802.11G or B (the router and the Airport card), and even then, 11mb and 54mb are mostly theoretical, and most traffic (with overhead, retransmitting of lost packets, etc.) will be about half that.
posted by adampsyche at 9:17 AM on October 21, 2004

2.5 megabytes per second doesn't sound ridiculously slow in practice, no. 2.5 megabits per second, yeah. That would be slow for a local file transfer.

What sharing type are you using? I found that the Windows File Sharing option on the Mac, while a nice convenience, is much slower than the FTP file sharing option. All you need is a Windows FTP client, which is easy to come by.

Also, be sure to try it wired and unwired, so you have something to compare it to.
posted by scarabic at 10:03 AM on October 21, 2004

It's all G, sorry, meant to make that clear
posted by ascullion at 10:04 AM on October 21, 2004

What protocol(s) are you using to share files? SMB? FTP? AppleTalk?
posted by pedantic at 10:05 AM on October 21, 2004