Recently I have encountered an interesting new problem with my DSL connection. Virtually every morning my network speed, using several speed test sites, will be somewhere in the 1 to 1.2 MegaBit range. Reboot the 2Wire modem, and necessarily the Airport Extreme Base station, as well as the Airport Express Base station and my network connection speed jumps to the 5.2 or better MegaBit range. I am reasonably confident the Airport Extreme or the Airport Express base stations are not the culprits as the slowdown is common to both of these.

My questions are:

1. Has anyone else encountered a similar problem?
2. What, if any, permanent solutions have you found?

I also have AT&T DSL service. Although I don't track it like you do, I can't say that I've noticed it being slower sometimes.

Thanks for the feedback. I have been tracking it enough now that I am seeing a continuous degradation from 5+ Mbps down to 1.2 Mbps over an average of about four hours. At the same time the latency goes from around 25 ms to roughly 256 ms. I am beginning to believe it is my model, but I am wondering if I am being throttled by AT&T although I have not heard any reports of their doing that.

does AT&T do local service? I thought that was qwest?

New information. After lots of experimentation and testing, it now appears the gradual deterioration is taking place in the Airport Extreme Base station, not the 2Wire modem. Has anyone seen that and/or know of any fix other than replacement? It is out of AppleCare coverage.

AT&T is the only ball game in town around here since they bought up the old Southwestern Bell system they originally spun off many years ago. We are a good 1,000 miles or more out of QWest's territory.

I couldn't tell from the Qwest website whether they cover Milwaukee or not. But I can't say that I've seen them advertising here. My bill comes from AT&T.

I've no idea if it's applicable to an AirPort Extreme Base Station (or, for that matter, even accurate), but an Apple wireless specialist told me a while back that AirPort Express Base Stations do not deteriorate, rather they suffer sudden catastrophic failure.

It still may be an AT&T problem. See this article regarding intentional AT&T slowdowns, the lawsuit and the compensation to users who were affected.

Thanks for the info Ira. I am still having problems after replacing everything in the system except AT&T's 2Wire modem and their outside plant bringing the signal to my house. Next step is to try to get them to replace the modem, this time with a simple ethernet modem and not the modem/router/WiFi. If that fails I guess it will have to be satellite or 4G.

It appears I owe AT&T an apology, I still can't figure out why my neighbors on three sides can get their fiber optic service but I am "out of range" by 1,000 feet, but the slowdown was not their problem. I saw a post on the Apple site that got me to thinking. So I shut off sync, which was running almost constantly, and Time Machine that was backing up to the new Time Capsule router. Instantly I was back up to 24 ms ping and 5+ Mbps download speed.

So based I...

1. opened System Preferences > MobileMe > Sync > Advanced and de-registered my iMac
2. opened iSync > Preferences > Reset Synch History
3. opened System Preferences > MobileMe > Sync > Advanced and re-registered my iMac
4. Reset all the sync preferences to Automatic and forced a sync from my iMac to MobileMe replacing the data on MobileMe

This new sync took only a few minutes compared to the L O N G syncs that had been going on. Best of all I am back to reliably getting 5+ Mbps download speeds.

My apologies to AT&T for all my muttering about them under my breath, but at least, after all the switching around, etc. I wound up with a new 2TB Time Capsule and its dual channel capability has enormously simplified my old network configuration that was complicated by running a 5GHz network on an Airport Extreme Base station for the computers and in order to support our iPhones and AppleTV a 2.4GHZ network on an Airport Express and as a bonus I ended up with extra Airport Expresses I am now using to extend both networks to provide five bars at the far end of the house.