Comments on: Airport: What is the Multicast Rate?

By: Kmurray

Kmurray — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 00:29:00 +0000

So do you think you could actually be degrading a wireless network, by setting multicast rates high? If you were trying to deter streaming audio/video traffic, isn’t it possible that your network experience might improve if you set the multicast rate at say 2MB?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 17:42:00 +0000

@brenwah: The Apple doc you refer to is unfortunately a little ambiguous. You need to keep in mind that the context of this doc is “Controlling the quality of audio and video streaming”. What do audio and video have to do with multicast? Those types of data transmissions often use multicast, instead of the more common unicast, in order to conserve overall available network bandwidth. When the Apple doc says “… only clients on the network that are within range and can achieve the speed you set will receive transmissions”, the transmissions its referring to are *multicast* (i.e. said audio and/or video) transmissions. Unicast transmissions (non-audio, non-video, i.e. just about *everything* else) will be transmitted regardless of the multicast rate setting.

By: brenwah

brenwah — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 15:17:00 +0000

I’ll admit that I don’t know what multicast means. That said, this article is remarkably similar to what apple states multicast is. Here is what the airport manual states about multicast:

“Multicast rate: Choose a multicast rate from the pop-up menu. If you set the
multicast rate high, only clients on the network that are within range and can
achieve the speed you set will receive transmissions.”

Thus, it seems like the author does know what he/she is talking about.

By: Dan Moulding

Dan Moulding — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:20:00 +0000

I have to wonder if you even know what multicast means. Multicast is a special category of data stream. The multicast rate option in Apple Airports only affects whether the Airport base station transmits *multicast streams*, given the data rate that currently connected clients support. If *no* connected client can maintain the selected data rate, then the base station simply does not transmit multicast streams. It has nothing to do with making, maintaining, or breaking the wireless connection, and in particular it has no effect on non-multicast traffic (i.e. the vast majority of data that flows over the typical wireless LAN). Telling people that lowering this value will increase their effective range is very misleading.

By: anonymous

anonymous — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:19:00 +0000

This article is a load of BS. Please dont misguide people.