I was at the Apple Store in Georgetown, MD and noticed their wifi was blazing fast. Not so much in speed (30mb up/30 mb down) but in latency. I was seeing 8-10ms ping times. Do Apple Stores use Airport Extremes or some commercial wireless router solution?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Do Apple Stores use Airport Extremes?
- Thread starter tibere86
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
They use Cisco commercial grade routers. A relatively average sized store has 10ish mounted in the ceiling to provide coverage for the entire store.
As far as the performance/latency goes, you're seeing the benefits of fiber optic internet. Try hardwiring next time you're in the store to really see what kind of speeds they get
Thanks for the info.They use Cisco commercial grade routers. A relatively average sized store has 10ish mounted in the ceiling to provide coverage for the entire store.
As far as the performance/latency goes, you're seeing the benefits of fiber optic internet. Try hardwiring next time you're in the store to really see what kind of speeds they get
If you're looking for specifics, it's essentially a big Cisco Aironet system set up to run a public 2.4GHz Wireless G network (This is the "Apple Store" network) and a 5GHz Wireless N network (the "Apple Demo" network). They also have a hidden 802.1x network for the EasyPay Touch devices.
As far as actual IP infrastructure, they tend to work with whoever the local ISP is for some mega bandwidth. Last store I was at could pull 250Mb/s easy, not counting the emergency failover infrastructure (typically a completely different ISP). They also have a couple edge servers in store for caching downloads from Apple.com/support and the Mac App Store, which is why Lion can download in about 5 minutes over ethernet (you end up maxing out your hard drive speed).
Crazy what you can do when money is no object, eh?
No problem. Always a fun topic to answer questions about.
I asked this same question of one of the genius when I was in there for an appointment a couple years back, and got the same answer that others have said with it being a Cisco network of commercial routers, although he did mention that they had a "couple" of AEs on the system as well, but what the public was seeing was primarily commercial Cisco network.