Late 2009 iMac and Gig Internet

[glibow]

Good Morning,

I have a late 2009 iMac, which I recently upgraded with 12GBs of memory and a SSD hard drive to give it new life. I just upgraded my internet to 1000Mbps. I was wondering if there was a way to upgrade my computer to handle speeds anywhere near that via WiFi. Can I just upgrade my Airport card in the computer to 802.11 a/c? I saw the Bearifi Bear Extender Turbo in another forum but wasn't sure if that would be compatible with my device and/or if my USB ports were powerful enough to power the speeds. Any suggestions would be appreciated. My Last speed test pulled 60 down and 90 up.

OS: Mac OS High Sierra Version 10.13.6
Memory: 12 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Processor: 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
All USBs are 2.0
1 FireWire Bus

 

[jwhazel]

You’re not going to get anything remotely close to 1Gbps over Wifi, even with brand new 2018 hardware, even with your router sitting right next to your computer. You need an Ethernet cable if you want full speed.

But if you still want WiFi, here’s the card you would want to upgrade to for a/c capability http://www.osxwifi.com/product/imac...94360cd-802-11-a-b-g-n-ac-with-bluetooth-4-0/


And here’s a breakdown of actual speeds you can expect (there’s a lot of factors that will affect this) https://www.speedguide.net/faq/what-is-the-actual-real-life-speed-of-wireless-374

 

[glibow]

You’re not going to get anything remotely close to 1Gbps over Wifi, even with brand new 2018 hardware, even with your router sitting right next to your computer. You need an Ethernet cable if you want full speed.

But if you still want WiFi, here’s the card you would want to upgrade to for a/c capability http://www.osxwifi.com/product/imac...94360cd-802-11-a-b-g-n-ac-with-bluetooth-4-0/


And here’s a breakdown of actual speeds you can expect (there’s a lot of factors that will affect this) https://www.speedguide.net/faq/what-is-the-actual-real-life-speed-of-wireless-374

Yeah I figured i wouldn’t get anything near 1000mbps but figured between 100-300 would be nice. Do you know if the bearifi usb option wouldn’t work or not? If I don’t have to open up the computer again that’s always a plus

 

[jwhazel]

I’ve never heard of this of this bearifi before but looking at their page, I don’t see any reason it won’t work. However I do notice this:

For maximum connection speeds, BearExtender Turbo must be used with an 802.11ac router and a USB 3.0 port

You don’t have usb 3. It is fully compatible with usb 2 and should work fine, You just wouldn’t get the maximum speed (according to them) so I suspect it wouldn’t be much faster than your current built in airport.

IMO a better option that gets you close to full speed is a gigabit powerline adapter. You’re using Ethernet for this, but don’t have to snake cable everywhere. Cost about the same as bearfi too.

 

[mikehalloran]

Ethernet is the only way to get the network speeds you want.

The possibility of getting internet at any decent speeds depends on your cable/DSL provider and the modem that connects you to it.