There’s a reason why the Tx rate of your Mac Wi-Fi keeps on fluctuating from time to time even if you have good signal strength.
A Fluctuating Wi-Fi Tx Rate on a Mac is Completely Normal and there are Several Reasons Behind it
Let me show you something interesting – click on the Wi-Fi symbol in the menu bar while holding down the ‘Option’ key on the keyboard. See all that information that wasn’t there before? Pretty interesting, right?
The most interesting thing here is the ‘Tx rate’ – or Transmission (Tx) rate – that shows you the speed at which your Mac is connected to your Wi-Fi router. Closer you are to the router, lesser the noise, the better the Tx rate is going to be.
However, if you already know all this and wondering why the Tx rate keeps on fluctuating from time to time, there is a good reason behind it.
Actually, several reasons.
First of all, if there are too many wireless devices connected to your router, the Tx rate will keep on jumping. This is absolutely normal. Your Wi-Fi router will automatically assign more speed to a device that is consuming more data which in turn may slow you down.
Secondly, if there are too many physical obstacles between you and your Wi-Fi router, the Tx rate will struggle to keep up and may drop drastically or suddenly go up.
However, if you are sitting right next to your router and notice very low Tx rate, this is because your Mac is idle and not downloading any data wirelessly, hence the Wi-Fi chip has gone into a low power state.
You can test this by launching a site like YouTube and stream something and you’ll notice the Tx rate jump to the highest speed possible given your location.
If your Mac stays connected to the Wi-Fi router at full speed, it’s not good for the battery and too much energy will be used which can definitely wear down the hardware in the long run.
It’s best not to worry about this speed at all as your Mac intelligently handles everything in the background along with your Wi-Fi router. You should only start to worry if you are experiencing frequent dropouts even with good signal strength.
