Can I do better with Time Capsule and Airport Extreme?

[steffi]

Today there's distance between my laptop and the cable providers modem.

So the setup is like this

cable providers modem->airport extreme in one corner of the room.

then

in the other corner.

I have time capsule plugged into a T3Plus which is plugged into Thunderbolt port of my MacBook Pro M1 MAX laptop.

So the communication between TC and AE is wireless.

Would making that wired speed things up at all?

 

[spyguy10709]

TC and AE are decade-plus old designs. You'd probably benefit greatly both by wired backhaul, but also by migrating to a more modern access point/NAS setup

 

[steffi]

I heard people say that but also then come back and see that things were better with the older gear. I'd be inclined to upgrade when things no longer work but for now it's not necessary.

Just trying to see if anybody's done anything like what I'm trying which is just having Airport Extreme->Wired->Time Capsule and make use of the hub on the TC with other devices all with everything in Bridge Mode.

As soon as I plugged the ethernet into the LAN of the Airport Extreme which also has the cable model plugged into it's WAN port I'll end up losing all internet across all devices.

 

[spyguy10709]

Your call as to what hardware you use. Just advising that... if you're after speed, you can pretty well accomplish that without a wired backhaul with a modern mesh (wifi 6E) setup.

But regarding

> As soon as I plugged the ethernet into the LAN of the Airport Extreme which also has the cable model plugged into it's WAN port I'll end up losing all internet across all devices.

Your network topography should be [cable modem LAN] -> [device 1 WAN] then another cable from [device 1 LAN] -> [device 2 WAN]

both the devices should be in "bridge mode" with the cable modem handling the IP addresses

 

[steffi]

so I believe that is what I have but as soon as I plug the cable into the LAN of the Device 1 LAN when it's already plugged into the Device 2 WAN I end up losing all internet from all devices connected to Device 1.

 

[spyguy10709]

so I believe that is what I have but as soon as I plug the cable into the LAN of the Device 1 LAN when it's already plugged into the Device 2 WAN I end up losing all internet from all devices connected to Device 1.

what you've described back to me... is backwards.

You shouldn't be connecting your cable modem to device 1 LAN, it should be going into device 1 WAN.

 

[steffi]

what you've described back to me... is backwards.

You shouldn't be connecting your cable modem to device 1 LAN, it should be going into device 1 WAN.

I’ve since got it working. The cable modem is plugged into device 1s WAN as it always has been. Seems it just require a few restarts of the base station and time capsule and then started behaving. And it’s much faster now.

 

[f54da]

Unless you've replaced the hard drive on your Time Capsule, it's a ticking time bomb, they are known to have Seagate HDD failures at higher rate.