08-19-2009, 02:12 PM

I have both an Early 2008 Macbook Pro and a Late 2008 Macbook Pro. I bought an Airport Extreme base station yesterday. On both laptops, I'm connected to the 802.11n 5Ghz network created by the base station. There was a significant difference in wireless speed for the two laptops.
To verify, I ran the network test on speedtest.net.
The Early 2008 macbook pro has a 220ms ping latency, 1Mbps upload and 1Mbps download.
The Late 2008 macbook pro has a 13ms ping latency, 7 Mbps upload and 15Mbps download.

I ran the test from the same location in my house, one after the other. I don't understand how there can be such a big difference. Anyone have any ideas?

08-19-2009, 11:05 PM

Some more info. Here are ping results for the two Macbook Pros. They were side by side when I ran the pings.

Early 2008 Macbook Pro:
PING 10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=71.445 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=297.662 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=218.965 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=140.316 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=61.618 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=255 time=290.063 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=255 time=211.506 ms

Late 2008 Macbook Pro:
jjoy$ ping 10.0.1.1
PING 10.0.1.1 (10.0.1.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=3.051 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=3.509 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=2.885 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=13.024 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=255 time=4.521 ms
64 bytes from 10.0.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=255 time=3.725 ms

Even while pinging my Airport Extreme base station, the Early 2008 Macbook Pro is much slower.