Time Capsule slow down: a hint

I want to share this new experience so that others can learn from it.
I've had Time Capsule for about 2 to 3 weeks now. It worked quite well for the first two weeks but this week it was really, really slow. I was going mad trying to figure out what was going on. The symptoms:
- Time Machine was spending a lot of time in the "Preparing Backup" stage
- Sometimes over 1 hour just to back up say 5MB worth of stuff
- Entering Time Machine was much slower than before
- and when I changed from using wifi to direct ethernet plug in, the backup would finish in no time
-, all backups even over wifi eventually; nothing was failing; it was just SLOW! VERY SLOW! SLOWER than before.
I was going insane trying to figure this out and even deleted all my backups and started from scratch.
Was it:
1. a corrupted diskimage?
2. something to do with a "delay ACK" setting I should fiddle around with according to one blog post?
3. A bad wifi chip on the Time Capsule?
4. Spotlight doing something funny?
It was none of these. I figured out what was going on. A neighbouring router had been interfering with my network using the same radio frequency. I don't think it was intentional. I was able to discover this after I set my mouse pointer to the wifi icon on the menu bar and pressed the option key while clicking on the icon. It showed a transmit rate of 11 or 9 instead of 54 (I'm using a G network).
The reason I didn't figure this out earlier is because my internet connection is relatively slow and B or G speeds make no difference in accessing my connection to the internet but makes a world of difference using the intranet (LAN).
I ended up switching the radio frequency my network operates on and now it's back to its normal speeds. A regular 20mb hourly update doesn't take over an hour but just takes mere minutes.
WHEW! I thought I was going insane!
Another interesting thing is that my Time Capsule is less than 12 feet from my laptop and yet my neighbour's wifi signal could interfere with it to the extent of making transfers go from 54 to 11 or less! Unfortunately I cannot switch to N because my laptop is a first generation MacBook Pro which did not come with the necessary N hardware.
Message was edited by: Conal Ho

Bad Monk wrote:
thanks for that!! interesting and i never knew the option key pressed while on the wifi icon showed that info so cheers
mine is on channel 11 but so far its @ 54 so thats all good, but yeah i think channel 11 is very popular as its prob the default for most wireless devices!
Most routers come with the default Channel 6 set.
question though, if i change the channel on my wireless router what is the best channel to go for please? and also do my wireless devices in my home automatically change to the new channel? or do i have to mess around with each one individually?
There is no "best" channel to go for. You have to figure out what channels are being used and select one that is not being used by other routers. ONe way to do this is download the free iStumbler software which will discover all visible and invisible networks and tell you what channels are being used. From that information, select a number that is farthest from any of the other channels being used.
thannks

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Message was edited by: JustStone

JustinK101 wrote: I suppose I could plug my MacBook into the TC via a gigbit cable and see the speed then, but the whole point was to do wireless backups.
The initial backup should have been wired. Future incremental backups would not be this large and wireless backups should be okay.

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