Blog Notes: Connection Speed

Sorry for the radio silence today—I've been offline all day as AT&T switched my connection from the old DSL to U-verse. My old download speeds were testing in the range of 2.5 Mbps all the way down to 0.24 Mbps—recently, especially, the connection has been poor, rarely rising above 1.5 Mbps and often falling below 1.0.

The new U-verse is testing right now at 5.69 Mbps. Should be an improvement! (This is the best service available in my area.)

However, there's one mystery remaining—I'm connected through an AT&T NVG510 modem and my Apple Airport Extreme. Everything is working properly, I'm connected to the Internet, the phone works fine—no problems anywhere—but the light on the Airport Extreme is flashing amber. Huh? That's supposed to mean it's not happy. But it's acting as if it is. (Anybody have a clue what that's all about?)

UPDATE: Problem solved—both the modem and the Airport were performing NAT. I set the base station to Bridge Mode and all is green and happy again. Thanks to all for the help!

And now off to moderate the comments to Ctein's post. Again, sorry for the delay.

—Mike, TOP IT Cretin and Director, Dept. of SNAFU

Comments

[Clyde Rogers]

Run Airport Utility on your Mac. It will tell you exactly what the blinking light is for (and might even help you get rid of it...).

Good luck!

[Matt]

Launch your AirPort Utility and that will tell you why it's blinking yellow. The last time that happened to me, all it was indicating was that an AirPort update was available.

[Steve Rosenblum]

Do these things in this order: turn off and unplug your modem, AirPort Extreme, and your Mac. Wait 5 minutes and then (in this order) first restart the modem and wait for the lights to light up one by one, then plug in and turn on the airport and wait a few minutes, then turn on your Mac and choose your network. That should fix it. If it doesn't you will need to use the airport utility to troubleshoot the airport.

[James Kirkus-Lamont]

Try running Airport Utility (Applications/Utilities/Airport Utility) and opening the Airport Extreme icon. It shed more light on what's up than a blinking LED.

[Dana Thomas]

.....it means it will talk but it wants to be something more than a mouthpiece......as the network you had or have. Do a hard reset on the Airport and it will reconfigure your network and be green again. Push the paper clip in the tiny hole until it blinks fast and go to your Airport Utility and follow the prompts to setup your network.
Hope this helps

[Tom Hoats]

Mike,

The flashing amber light usually means the Airport Extreme device has learned there is a firmware upgrade that needs to be loaded. There is an Apple program in the Utilities folder that handles the process. This type of upgrade is not handled by the normal System Update app, you have to do it separately.

[Pedro Côrte-Real]

A quick googling gets me this:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1589

Seems like it could be a bunch of stuff and that you need to run "AirPort Utility" to check it out.

[Gary]

The amber light could be a signal for an available software upgrade.

[Mike]

I have had the same issue since my simple cable modem was replaced by a combination modem / router. If you run the AirPort Utility I think you will find it showing an warning of "Double NAT".

With a simple pass through cable modem your Airport does something called Network Address Translation (NAT). It presents all the computers inside your home / on your inetrnal network as a single computer on the Intenet - it translates the 192.168.0.* addresses (or similar) on your home network as a single address to the outside world.

Now, with your Airport plugged into the combined U-verse modem/router they are both doing NAT. Your Airport is warning you that it can't do NAT properly. That should not be a problem unless you have computers inside the house that are trying to offer services to the Internet. If all your in-house computers are just clients accessing external services then you will be fine.

If your U-verse modem allows you to turn off NAT and become a simple pass-through pipe then you may be able to stop your modem flashing. I have been reluctant to tamper with my cable modem settings in case I lost my network altogether and was left waiting on a phone for hours to get it fixed. I could probably do it but I don't have enough reason to bother. That flashing light is annoying though.

Many thanks for your work with TOP ... it is the only photography site that I check out daily.

[David Burren]

The amber light could be indicating any of a bunch of issues, including the availability of newer firmware. Fire up Airport Utility on a computer on the LAN and query the Airport Extreme for the details.

[KeithB]

I had the same problem when I switched to a smarter modem. I believe that there is a setting to tell it that it is now a device and not the main router.

Or, it might want new firmware.

[Paul R]

The flashing light indicates there is a firmware update available. Open the Airport Utility software to install the update. My were doing this awhile back and I had no idea what it meant until someone clued me in.

[psu]

If you have the airport admin app on your Mac you can use it to ask the Airport why it is unhappy. It's probably something to do with NAT settings or some such.

[Hoainam]

I bet this will solve the problem:
http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/qa-a-fix-for-a-blinking-router/?ref=technology

[Michel]

it might be that there is a firmware update for the device or a software update for Airport Manager.

[Mandeno Moments]

New Zealand has slow speeds by international standards, but yours is glacial :-)

I'm half a mile from the exchange on ADSL. Generally I get 11Mbps down and 1Mbps up. The latter is a nuisance when sending photos to cloud backup.

On the bright side, you're a lot better off than you were.

[Tim Harrison]

Mike

I strongly suggest you move to Hong Kong, I have the "basic" connection which gives me a reliable 25Mbps (both up and down). 100Mbps is regularly available to most customers and a 1Gbps can be obtained in some developments.

[Chris Y]

The nonsense they put us through to use technology. Someone please tell me we're still in the gaslight era of communication.....

[Mike Johnston]

Tim,
That's awesome. What would one need 1 Gbps for?? I guess sending and receiving huge image or video files?

Higher speeds are available in Milwaukee, 20 miles down the road. Here there's no competition--one DSL ISP, one cable. I'll be happy for the time being if my speeds never dip below 5 Mbps.

Mike

[William Barnett-Lewis]

Pray you don't need support from ATT. U'verse was a disaster for me in Madison. It would randomly cut out for 10 to 15 minutes at a time all, almost every time the phone rang as well. The speed rarely got back up that high in the long term. Of course according to support, even when the net was down, everything was working fine... (insert random string of obscenities).

Perhaps they've sorted it out since last spring in Madison, but I'd even take the thugs at Charter over ATT in a worst case scenario.

[David]

Just a little FYI for you Comcast subscribers who have one of these routers.

The flashing amber light and associated diagnostic has a limited range of useful info. For example, the double-NAT condition it detected might not always be solvable by switching to Bridge mode, because Bridge mode might actually be wrong in some situations (not Mike's obviously.)

A few times a year AirPort Utility says I've got a double-NAT condition. All that is required is a phone call to Comcast's automated help and select the "send a reset command to your modem." No rebooting of anything anywhere.

I learned the hard way that when I followed AirPort Utilities' advice about switching to Bridge mode IN THIS SPECIFIC LIMITED SCENARIO you wind up in a dead end rabbit hole of false DNS address conflicts and more and can't go back without resetting the AirPort Extreme (a Time Capsule would have the same issue) back to factory defaults.

[MarkR]

I find a piece of black electrical tape about so big, placed strategically over the offending light fixes the problem nicely and also reduces stress and blood pressure issues.

Helpful hint: also works for annoying car dash lights.

[Carl Blesch]

Mike, you wrote "... all the way down to 0.24 Mbps ..."
Not much faster than back in the 90s (the 1990s, of course) when 56K modems were the fastest way to connect a home computer to an online information service (e.g. CompuServe, America Online).
Carl

[Mark K Lough]

After experiencing (still!) a far less than satisfying switch in my DSL "service" from AT&T, not that I had any choice, I've spoken to a number of telephone robots at AT&T and to a person at the nearest like-branded store. No help. My internet speeds prior to the switch were at 1.5 Mb plus, and now peak at .6Mb. Whee.
Interested readers would like to hear commentary via NPR's Terri Gross on Fresh Air. An interview with David Cay Johnston about his views expressed in "The Fine Print".
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/20/161477162/a-close-look-at-your-bills-fine-print

[Daniel]

Connection speed? It is what it is. Dial up, then satellite. A bit faster but not much and the service outage when it rained, snowed or the wind blew too hard. At least dial up still worked when it snowed or was cloudy. Then the phone company put in a new line with repeaters out to the farm. We're the last one on the line - 9 miles out.(town is about 600 people) and the line services 5 farms here.
Just had the service guy out to fix the line as the last repeater was bullet hole ridden and had to be replaces as well as the line patched where either beaver or muskrats had chewed it when digging down for winter burrows.

Fast connection? Won't happen here and I'm not driving the 44 miles for a one hour session at the Library in the next 'big town' of about 3,000. So, we live with it and upload photos to a gallery and tie up the computer for 3-12 hours overnight and hope the connection doesn't hiccup.

Big city advantages? Made up for with clear and clean air, geese noise on the ponds, coyotes seranading us most nights, no trains within hearing and nearest pavement a bit more than 2 miles away and that a two lane country road. Northern Light shows are a great form of entertainment as well. We're going to start freeze up in the next few weeks and shortly the ice on the ponds will be thick enough to walk on and great for winter photography. Tripods set up great on ice, much better than on a boat.

Does get crowded at times tho with more combines and grain trucks than cars or pickups but sure makes for some good photos.