Best Router For Mac Os Sierra

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Apple ships a little-known utility app that helps you analyze and diagnose your Wi-Fi connection, called Wireless Diagnostics. Open the app by option-clicking on the Wi-Fi indicator in the menu bar and select ‘Open Wireless Diagnostics …’. Although the app contains a lot of useful information, it isn’t intuitively clear what you are supposed to do with it.

Frustrated by bad WiFi on Mac OS X? This guide may help you get better WiFi on your computer.

Follow along below for a walkthrough of all the screens in Wireless Diagnostics that can help you analyze your Wi-Fi network and find any weak spots. It can be daunting to see so many stats at once but in reality you are only interested in a couple of numbers. We’ll explain what’s important.

Assistant

The first screen is the Assistant, the app’s automatic step-by-step diagnostics wizard for detecting common network problems. At the end of the process, the assistant generates a report that can be sent to Apple Support for further assistance. As a standalone self-help tool, however, the assistant is not very useful in my opinion. The more interesting data for individuals can be found on different windows of Wireless Diagnostics. Access these other views from the Window menu bar item.

Info

The Info tab is a simple table panel that displays information relating to the wireless connection. This includes quick access to information like the MAC address of the hardware, the Wi-Fi mode, operating band and channel. The current noise and RSSI levels are also displayed here, more on that later.

This screen is useful for quick diagnosis of the most obvious problems. For example, if you are running a dual-band Wi-Fi network like the AirPort Extreme, it’s worth checking that you are actually running on the GHz band that you expect.

If you were expecting to see 5GHz listed but don’t, first check your router configuration and then try moving closer to the base station. As 2.4GHz usually provides longer range signals, a common error for Wi-Fi performance is to simply move closer to the unit so the laptop can pickup the (faster) 5GHz link.

Another interesting data point to check is the Tx rate which states the maximum possible transfer speed for the current connection. If you have super-fast fiber broadband but your quoted Tx rate is only 78 Mbps, don’t be disappointed when your maximum Internet speed is also capped at 78. You may need to change settings or upgrade your hardware to a new router (suggestions below) to take full advantage of your ISP’s speed.

What’s slightly confusing is that the Tx rate is not constant for a particular router: it will vary as the system adapts to wireless conditions with the mentality that a slow, stable, connection is better than a faster, unreliable, one. The Wireless Diagnostics panels update with the new live values if the Tx rate changes.

Logs

The Logs tab is perhaps the most inscrutable window in Wireless Diagnostics as its entire purpose is to record relevant network process activity to a system log file which can then be inspected in the Console app. These logs are not that simple to decipher for humans, however, and are very noisy.

One nice thing it does do is keep a periodic history of Wi-Fi connection quality, assuming you can read through the extraneous lines. If you wanted to test RSSI readings across the house, you could enable logging and then take your MacBook for a walk. Afterwards, export the log and extract the best and worst case readings. A more approachable version of the same information can be found in other views.

Scan

Likely the most useful window, Scan relays information about your network and the other networks in the vicinity. This is particularly important for people who live in congested areas, like a block of flats, where many Wi-Fi stations are setup in close proximity. Scan allows you to see the channels on which these other Wi-Fi routers are operating.

When you think about Wi-Fi, normally it’s in the context of interference from interior walls. Having too many Wi-Fi stations communicating on the same band/channel can also cause crippling interference problems which results in unreliable internet and connections that drop out. The left-hand side of the Scan window suggests the best ‘clear’ channels in the area for both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz.

If you are experiencing intermittent service with your Wi-Fi, check this screen and set your router to use a different channel for its communications, picking the “best” one for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands as suggested by the application. I recently did this and saw a huge improvement in network reliability; my connection used to randomly disconnect for several seconds a few times a day, now the failure rate is close to once a week. I currently live in a block of flats so it’s prone to network congestions, with every flat having its own distinct Wi-Fi setup.

Performance

The Performance tab plots RSSI and Noise levels on a graph. Unfortunately, the interface is lacklustre and non-interactive: you can’t click on individual readings or zoom into the graphs for example. You can drag the dividers between the items to make the graphs larger or smaller, though. It’s probably time to explain these concepts.

RSSI is best thought of as a measure of signal strength, even if that isn’t wholly accurate. How to get powerpoint on mac. The higher, the better. To confuse matters, dBM readings are measured from 0 to -100, so smaller numbers in magnitude (i.e. numbers closer to zero) are better. For Apple hardware, aim for numbers above -60 in general.

The noise reading rates nearby interference from other wireless equipment using the same spectrum; most of this comes from other wireless access points. Lower is better (so larger absolute numbers). Generally, high interference is around -70 and -100 is the best you can practically achieve. The Performance tab also shows the ratio of signal-to-noise on a separate red-line graph — this ratio ultimately determines link quality. A good benchmark for strong Wi-Fi relay is a signal-noise difference above 25.

Sniffer

Sniffer records packets from the local network to review later. The tool captures packets from a given channel and saves them to a file. Weirdly, the app can’t open the log files that it creates so you’ll have to use a third-party tool.

The best choice is an app called Wireshark: the logs show all the traffic channeling over the network. This isn’t really helpful to diagnosing Wi-Fi performance so you can ignore the tab.

Monitor

The Monitor tab is a dashboard window summarizing the important information from each of the other tabs. It includes IP address, transmit rate, signal and noise graphs, and more. With a dark black appearance, you could even leave this panel open on your desktop — almost like a widget. It intelligently resizes to show subsets of the data as well, if you prefer a more compact form.

Conclusion

The most important stats are the Tx rate, the RSSI and the signal-to-noise ratio. If these numbers are worse than you expect, it’s time to buy new routers, add wireless repeaters or move closer to the router itself. Once you have switched up your setup, use the Wireless Diagnostics tools again to see if the change you made were an improvement to overall signal strength.

Although moving antennas or hardware around can help, if you want better speed, often you will have to resort to buying new equipment. It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that the Wi-Fi routers from your cable provider are almost always inferior to dedicated hardware.

Apple’s latest AirPort Extreme is simple to set up and well-specced although arguably better routers are also available from other manufacturers, like this ASUS router, if you don’t mind a bit more technical setup and configuration. Powerline network extenders are also really useful to combat connectivity dead spots in your house; it’s a simple matter of plugging a little adapter into the wall to bring solid Internet to the zone.

If you live close to a lot of other houses with their own access points (flats) and are experiencing a flakey connection, check the channel your router is operating at in the Scan view and change it to one of the suggested channels. This can have a huge impact on Wi-Fi stability … it certainly helped me.

Having helped usher in simple-to-use Wi-Fi networking in 2000 with its futuristic-looking AirPort Base Station, Apple has finally confirmed what has been reported since at least late 2016: Its line of AirPort and Time Capsule Wi-Fi gateways is dead. This comes as no surprise, given that the last updates for the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule models internals came in 2013 (to include the 802.11ac Wave 1 standard), while the compact AirPort Express has remained stuck in 2012.

Apple has, however, embedded recent Wi-Fi technology in the radio systems of its computers, mobile devices, and the Apple TV. And the company will continue to sell out its current inventory and, of course, honor its technical support and warranty obligations.

If you’re an Apple household and your home is already full of Apple base stations, you may be concerned about pivoting away and losing features you rely on, or creating a mixed network of Apple and non-Apple routers. You need not be concerned, because you actually have several options, which we describe below. As for losing out on special features, see our section on why Apple's proprietary base station features are no longer relevant.

(A tip on extending the life of your AirPort base station: If you purchase an AppleCare warranty for a Mac and have bought an AirPort base station of any vintage within the two years prior to the Mac’s purchase date, Apple extends the warranty to the AirPort gear through the duration of the AppleCare warranty. You can wind up with as much as five years of base station warranty that way.)

Drop-in replacement: A Wi-Fi router

Your router choices can come down to whether you want to sweep everything out of the house and start fresh, or you’re looking to replace or extend an existing network. The best cheap routers have effectively the same features and networking philosophy as the Apple base stations. They’re really a combination of an access point (Wi-Fi management), a router (moving packets around a network and to and from the internet), and an ethernet switch to handle devices that only have wired connections or that work best with a gigabit ethernet connection.

If you’re using or planning to use two or more of this kind of “old-style” gateway, they should be connected via ethernet. (See below why WDS or similar wireless systems aren’t reliable and reduce performance.)

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Mesh networks, described in the next section, work like gateways, but some lack ethernet switches entirely, and they have extremely robust connections among each other.

This is where your budget comes to the fore: It’s easy to drop $300 to $500 on a great, new, multi-router mesh Wi-Fi solution that fills every nook and cranny in a house and never needs to be poked. But you can also spend as little as $100 for a single gateway that could work nearly or completely as well in a more modest single-floor house, apartment, or condo.

For a single or multiple old-style router network, the Netgear R6700 Nighthawk AC1750($100) offers nearly everything you need in a drop-in AirPort Extreme replacement. You can swap out an AirPort base station and swap this in, and you might not notice the difference. It’s also a good choice for multiple units, due to its cost, or you could find Wi-Fi extenders, which connect via ethernet and are used just to fill out coverage.

The R6700 has a USB 3.0 port for hard-drive sharing, a USB 2.0 port for printer sharing, and a four-port gigabit ethernet LAN switch. A drive attached via the router can be used with ReadyDLNA, which allows streaming media from the drive to certain gaming systems and TVs. Unlike Apple’s base station, the Netgear router allows for QoS (Quality of Service) prioritization, letting you elevate audio and video streaming above other data, which improves playback. The R6700 can set up a separate guest-access network.

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The one proviso here is that we haven’t reviewed the R6700 yet, though it’s received excellent marks from customers and was the previous budget pick by the New York Times’ product review site, Wirecutter. Our sister publication PCWorld has, however, reviewed favorably the Nighthawk R7000, which has a similar feature set, potentially faster throughput, and better speed at a distance. But it costs about $145.

Mesh networks: The new hotness

The alternative to the AirPort-style routers, both cheap and expensive, is a mesh networking system. Mesh networks don’t require configuration on each device to get them to find each other, and they don’t require an ethernet cable. Rather, mesh devices—called nodes—self-configure, making the optimum connection for routing data among themselves. The best systems help you place routers for best performance around your house or office, too. (For more information, read my in-depth explanation.)

Mesh nodes manage this with multiple radios, devoting one radio to communicating among other nodes, and with proprietary networking systems for node communication. On the Wi-Fi side, it’s all standard and all Wi-Fi devices connect as expected. The use of proprietary intra-node communication means that you can’t mix and match nodes from different manufacturers.

Mesh networking systems usually offer help through an app or visual signals (like an LED) about where to place nodes optimally for coverage. If you decide you need more coverage (or, in some cases, better throughput), you can just add more units, and the system reconfigures itself to accommodate them. Some mesh systems rely entirely on a smartphone app, available for iOS and Android, leaving out web-based or desktop app configuration, but others have both smartphone and web app options.

We’ve recently picked our top Wi-Fi systems, all of which are mesh:

• Netgear Orbi received our top marks. For $300 you can buy two nodes, a Router, and full-sized Satellite, each of which has ethernet LAN ports (3 and 4, respectively). Or, for the same price, get a bundle with the Router model and two smaller satellites, which have an integral AC power plug but no ethernet ports.

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• Linksys Velop offers better throughput through its radio design. For $340, a two-node package can blanket many houses; a three-node bundle is $450. The units include two gigabit ethernet jacks under their bases, one of which has to be connected to a broadband modem on one of the nodes.
• TP-Link Deco M5 is our budget pick, with less throughput but only costing $230 for three nodes.

Competition has dropped the prices of some of the leading mesh systems, and it’s likely the price will drop somewhat further, but with our top pick at as little as $100 per node and our budget at about $80 per node, it’s not likely to drop as much as prices have already in the last couple of years.

What about Apple’s proprietary base station features?

From Apple’s introduction of the original AirPort until just a few years ago, its base stations were often the best on the market, even if sometimes the most expensive'. However, for Mac users in particular, the gateways had Apple-specific features you couldn’t get elsewhere.

At one point it included:

• AirPlay audio passthrough (AirPort Express only)
• Easy printer networking
• Network-attached storage (NAS) with AFP (Apple Filing Protocol) and SMB support
• Base station to base station networking (via Wireless Distribution System or WDS)
• Internet access to base station configuration and NAS drives via Back to My Mac
• A network punch-through protocol called NAT-PMP for enabling remote access for applications, like games and servers
• AirPort Utility’s GUI interface
• Automated notification of firmware updates
• Time Machine support built into Time Capsule

Other features found in Apple’s base stations are easy to find in other routers:

• DHCP assignment or “reservation,” offering a permanent local network address to a device on the network
• Separate network names for 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi networks
• Guest networking (access to an isolated and protected network for guests)
• Timed and device-based access control

Each of Apple’s advantages has slipped away over the years:

AirPlay audio passthrough. This remained a unique feature of the AirPort Express, which features an S/PDIF-compatible (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format) analog/digital combination 3.5mm port. Plug in a regular analog cable, and you get analog out. Use a Mini TOSlink cable, and it carries digital information over an optical link to an S/PDIF port in a receiver. Apple TV models used to include a similar port, which was removed in the fourth-generation model. (I wrote an article about extracting the audio from the newest Apple TV, and reviewed a high-end HDMI audio splitter/passthrough device, which is still available at Amazon and some other retailers.) Some receivers and other devices include AirPlay, and you can use Rogue Amoeba’s Airfoil to create AirPlay and similar destinations. (See “The 10 must-have utilities for macOS Sierra,” for more on Airfoil.)

Printer sharing. Even quite inexpensive printers now include Wi-Fi networking, allowing a completely cable-free connection. And most Wi-Fi routers include USB-based printer support that’s compatible with macOS (although not always with iOS).

Network-attached storage. Apple’s attached drive support used to be a big deal when OS X was oriented around AFP, and it was difficult to create networked fileservers except Mac OS X Server or personal filesharing in regular OS X. Apple shifted to SMB for network filesharing, which makes it easier to work with Windows-compatible servers. Standalone NAS drives have significantly better features and performance, and are available at all sorts of prices, not just for caviar budgets. Cloud-based storage and sync services reduce the need for network servers. And streaming and on-demand services have replaced some of the purpose for fileservers that mostly held video. If you still need a router-attached hard drive, most AirPort competitors offer USB-shared drives via SMB.

Base station to base station networking. I used to tout this feature as a great way to work around obstructions like walls and ceilings, and while the WDS that Apple used to make it work was an industry standard, only Apple seemed to have mastered it. But it became less and less reliable over time, even as data rates went up by leaps and bounds. I stopped recommending wireless base station interconnection about four or five years ago, and suggest gigabit ethernet (which can require running cable), powerline networking (which works through unmodified electrical outlets), or a mesh network (explained later) that uses a separate radio for connecting base stations.

Remote configuration and drive access. Back to My Mac (BtMM) was once a great feature, especially for people with Macs in multiple locations. However, it’s not reliable and not robust, where other remote access tools (like TeamViewer) work with aplomb. It’s rare you’d need to change your base station’s configuration outside of its LAN, and remote-drive access can be accomplished in a lot of other ways, including with many standalone NAS devices. The feature requires an iCloud account to function, and I and many users had our base stations work in a semi-useless mode until we removed the iCloud account from the base station’s configuration. From some users’ accounts, the problem remains.

Network punchthrough. NAT-PMP stands for Network Address Translation Port Mapping Protocol. While Apple developed it (in 2005), it wasn’t proprietary: it was submitted as a standard. However, it was barely picked up by any other party. Instead, the computer industry as a whole went for UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). Nearly every base station and networked piece of hardware supports UPnP, as well as multi-platform software like VNC and Plex.

AirPort Utility. Apple has long had a leg up by offering a friendly face for Wi-Fi router configuration, especially compared with the web-based administrative frontends for most other devices. Even as Apple added an iOS version of AirPort Utility, it dropped updates for the Windows flavor, locking users into configuring only from Apple hardware. In recent years, router makers have improved their web apps or added smartphone configuration apps. Some systems have very little a user needs to configure, obviating access to dozens of settings, too.

Firmware update notification. This remains a big divide between Apple’s base stations and the direct routing competition. Very few routers notify you when firmware updates appear, and I can’t find any that even let you sign up for a mailing list specific to your router. Apple provides alerts in macOS, and it’s a one-click operation to download and install. More expensive multi-device “mesh” systems automatically push new software to routers or keep most of the intelligence in the cloud.

Time Capsule. When Apple first released the Time Capsule base station, it seemed like a nifty portmanteau, packing two great features into one box at an affordable price. Over time, Apple boosted capacity substantially. But I haven’t recommended the Time Capsule for years, because the integral drive can’t be removed or managed. If Time Machine backup goes awry in a Time Capsule, your only option is to wipe the entire drive. If the Time Capsule dies, you have to crack open a case not intended to be open, extract the drive, and put it in another enclosure. While I don’t recommend Time Machine by itself, either, using a drive attached to a Mac for networked backups gives you much better alternatives. Or you might already be using a cloud-based backup service.

If you still rely on some of the above features, notably printer and drive sharing, you don’t have to give them up, though you might have to reconfigure a device or sort out the best way to make changes. For instance, when I started having trouble with an older HP printer connected via USB to an AirPort Extreme, I went through a settings wizard on the printer that had failed to work for me before, and finally got it to join the Wi-Fi network directly.

And unless you plan to dump all your working Apple base stations, you can always keep one or more running in a network for AirPlay audio streaming or printer/drive support if you still need it.

Bottom line

Even with Apple long out of the picture, you’re not missing much. The AirPort base stations unique features have mostly migrated to other devices, and macOS and iOS require less proprietary support than ever before. Mesh is the future, and its cost has dropped into a reasonable range for many households. But old-school routers like the AirPort Extreme continue to be available at affordable prices.