Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Slower than dialup!

It was so fustrating...I thought the culprit was student loading the campus WiFi network. Though it occurred to me that it started being really slow after the application of the 10.4.8 update.

So, I searched and searched for why.....there was a vague reference to something called CoconutWiFi as a culprit. But, I didn't know what it was...so figured it didn't apply, so I kept looking for the culprit in my case.

Finally, I looked up what CoconutWiFi was...while I didn't have it or anything like it running on my MBP....I did have Yahoo! Widget "Sys Monitor" running.

Turning this widget off, made a dramatic improvement to my speed.....I ran several speed tests to confirm.....speed differences were like 10kbps versus 2200 kbps.

I can't believe I suffered this long....

OTOH, I was positive that I had taken the MBP home a time or two, and didn't observe this level of degradation.... Could be the fact that campus is a large area served by many different APs on different channels around campus, all with the same SSID. While home, my APs are all on one frequency (and the neighbors' have different SSIDs...and different channels). Or some other technical factor....