I don’t know what went wrong during the setup, but my new and shiny Time Capsule is a pretty lousy WLAN access point.
Let me give you the scenario. Until last week I used a 5 year old Netgear Rangemax wireless access point. It wasn’t in perfect shape anymore, because I could not configure anything on it. It was just a standard WLAN called netgear, open, unsecured, but it still worked. I just could not kick myself enough in the lower back, to buy something new. Last week I thought, that’s enough, I buy a TimeCapsule and have two solutions for things I should have done month ago, backup and secure WLAN. As expected, the installation went without any problems and the backup is working fine, but the WLAN is worse than before. Speed checks show 3 times more upload than with the Netgear, but pages load slower and some don’t load at all or are messed up. Something I did not have with the Netgear (and right when you want to post an example of a page, which was consistently messed up until 5 minutes ago with time capsule and did load nicely with Netgear, the problem went away. Not even deleting the cash brings the problem back. I am sure it comes back as soon as I put the post online).
The range of the time capsule is a disappointment. Everybody told me, that it easily works over two to three stories. Forget it! It has less range than the netgear.
When I watch a streaming video on the iPad, it stops all the time, even when I am literalily sitting on the Time Capsule. Before I could sit on the proch, browse and watch streams, now I can be happy to have a connection at all.
Did I miss something somewhere? Can I tune the darn thing or should I just give it back?
I had this issue before when I first got the time capsule. What I found was happening (in my case) is that the TC is auto switching channels if it found degradation in speed.
In the settings lock the low and high band to fixed channels. Also if your device can accept it, switch it to the 5GHz channel. It very slightly decreases range, but stops interference from other devices/appliances in the house.
Other that if users are doing extensive writing to the disk while you are reading from the same disk it will cause lag. Sadly no way around it, which is why I use the TC drive for back ups only (Time Machine/Windows) and an attached drive for any kind of video/photos/music.