Has anyone else got a Time Capsule and find it to be the slowest piece of gear ever designed and invented by ANY company in the history of the universe?

I am astounded by the absolutely abismal speeds I get from this thing.

Backing up is beyond a chore (plenty of whinging about Time Machine and Time Capsule on the web, google is your friend if you're remotely interested).

I've got mine connected to my ADSL2+ router and then via cable to my PM and I've managed to achieve a cut in half of the speeds I can get cutting the time capsule out of the equation all together.

Port forwarding on it is a disaster also, with the ports not being open despite the airport assistant dutifully telling me it's opened them up.

Poor design, poor useability, poor everything apart from aesthetics (it looks awesome).

I'm bitterly disappointed in this piece of hardware and I seriously want my cash back - I could have brought a drobo for what I paid for this and gotten faster speeds out of connecting it to my three year old airport express (802.11g!).

Anyway, whinge over. Apple's forums is full of people whinging about the same things and trying to find a way around it. Anyone here got any suggestions on how to make this slick looking piece if hardware less of an embarrassment?

(out of five)

I'll reserve my judgment until our unit is supplied. I am hoping to have it by late next week, but who knows. It might be delayed again.

Until then I will keep my mind open. Sorry to hear about your misfortune.

Kuma had a pretty good review of it last week:

Time Capsule - My experience.

Are you experiencing slow speeds all the time or just on the first backup?

Wait. Does that count as being slow?

Why would you want to do port forwarding on your Time Capsule if you have an ADSL2+ router? You should probably have your TC in "Bridge mode", in which case things like port forwarding make no sense.

As for speeds, do you have wireless turned on on your PM? Sometimes even if you have an ethernet cable plugged in, OSX tries to talk via wireless. It's very annoying, but the one way to guarantee it's not happening is to turn off the wireless on your PM. Then try and do a backup, and see how fast it is.

Mine is running great! I've got it hooked up to my MP via gigabit ethernet, and it's backing up two macbooks via wireless without any problems that I can think of. Reception is great, and wireless speed is pretty good too (much better than our 802.11g Airport Express, which now has it's wireless turned off, performing AirTunes duty).

My boss is having a similar issue. It gets to somewhere between 60 and 90% of the first initial backup then craps out. Doesn't seem to matter if it is wired or wireless, it just won't do the initial backup. It also seems to be getting/giving grief to his cordless phone, but that should be solvable by changing channel. I have offered to help him out, so if I find any magical solution it will be posted here soon after
- Bez

The backup is slow, but that's expected, and I'm not talking about that - it's everything, the first backup, browsing the web and file sharing between computers...

For the TC, the ADSL2+ router is simply the connection to the net, the TC is doing the distribution of IP addresses to the two MBA's and to the PM (via gigabit ethernet, no wireless on my PM).

If I pull the cable out of the back of the TC and put it into the router, speeds of 16000 kb/sec, if I use the TC, speeds are 6000 kb/sec.

(interestingly, the MBA's tend to connect to it without trouble and have backed up to it over about 5-6 hours - the PM and the TC don't play nicely together)

Certainly not. I had hoped to have it already at the same time my wife's MacBook Air came in. Oh well little bit longer I guess.

Will express my thoughts on the unit once I have the unit to use.

With a change of hardware (iMac & a MBP) this has been my experience.

My internet exp has improved.

Care to share a network diagram of how you have your network configured, along with it showing the ip addresses in use on various segments (if at all different).

You don't happen to be doing double NAT or something stupid like that?

I have a TC as well, and I hate it. The wireless backups do take a goodly long while, and the WiFi network itself is now unstable and buggy where I had no problems with my old Netgear (which I am now running in parallel). My Mac Mini's wireless speeds approach zero at random, and windows machines have all sorts of problems with it.

I like the configuration utility, but at the moment, not worth the money at all.

People will buy Rev A goods without waiting for reviews... no sympathy i'm afraid!

(sorry to sound harsh- but.....)

My time capsule runs the same speed if not faster than my previous wireless router and hasn't had a dropout since I received it so I really can't complain at all!

Someone has to buy them and use them. - and if you need it at the time then why wait?

Sitting on your high horse in your glass house doesn't add to the conversation nor help with peoples experience.

That makes me a bit sad. I have a Mac Mini HTPC, and since I got the time capsule, it starts seizing up whenever I play a video over wifi. (I've found that 802.11g is definitely fast enough to play compressed movies fine, but too slow to play a DVD Rip). If I turn airport off and on again on the mini, it tends to come good at least for a while, so I blame TC. I'm waiting anxiously for more patches.