An interesting find today. I have two Airport Extreme base stations, one as the main base station (with the media server in the living room hooked up via Ethernet) and the other used to extend the network with my server hooked up directly via Ethernet. I've been running them in 11b/g/n compatibility mode on the standard 2.4 Ghz band, but even though the base station claims to have connectivity speeds up to 130Mbps* between the two base stations (although this fluctuates between 78 and 117 most of the time) my throughput was not as good as I'd like. I'm using Time Machine backing up to a share on the OS X Server machine and throughput fluctuates between 1.5 and 2 MBps*, generally stabilizing around 1.7.
So I've decided to use my little Airport Express base stations to publish an 11g network on the 2.4 Ghz band and reserve the Extremes for 5Ghz. To switch the Airport Extremes to 11n over 5Ghz all it took was changing the setting on the main base station, the secondary picked up the modification without any changes to the configuration. The result (at first) looked to be disappointing.
The displayed bandwidth is now down to 60Mbps - probably due to the brick chimney between the base stations (and the fact that they're also on different floors). What's interesting is that despite this ostensible drop in bandwidth the throughput has jumped up to a stable 2.8MBps +/- 400KBps. So the net gain is a 60% boost is throughput.
Amazingly, I was able to make this change from the office, using the Back to My Mac screen sharing to fiddle with the Airport settings and the current Time Machine backup in progress survived the reboot of the router without any problems.
So when I get home tonight all I have to do is hook up one Airport Express in bridge mode to one of the Extreme base stations via Ethernet, and I'll have the best of both worlds.
*For the purposes of this discussion:
Mbps = Megabits per second
MBps = Megabytes per second
Update : I just noticed another factor in the equation. My physical presence or lack thereof. When I'm not in the living room interfering with the radio waves, I get better throughput. By standing in front of the router I can watch the signal drop off by varying degrees.
Update : I just noticed another factor in the equation. My physical presence or lack thereof. When I'm not in the living room interfering with the radio waves, I get better throughput. By standing in front of the router I can watch the signal drop off by varying degrees.