airport express UK 2.5x and US firmware

[hellron]

i know that due to UK law(or thats the theory as i understand) at 5Ghz airport extremes cant use the 40Hz frequency and so are only advertised as 2.5 times as fast as G.
my question is, shurly thats down to the firmware, so can i(if i can get hold of it) install the US firmware and get the 40Hz band and the 5X increase?

or have i arrived a year too late and all this has been talked to death and i just didnt find it when i searched the forum!!?

 

[hellron]

if anyone in the UK has the same problem as me i have found the very very simple solution!!

if you click on wireless tab in airport utility application then options button, and select another country from the location tab, i chose switzerland but lots of other countries also have work, then the "use wide channels" button appears, check it, and you have 40Hz like the US. well thats what i think, i certainly got a speed increase from the 5mb/s i was getting to between 8 and 9.

by the way the title is misleading i meant airport extreme, for some reason the airport express doesnt have a country selection bit and you can use the 40Hz band from the the box.

 

[andym172]

I can't appear to find it? Does the button/box appear after you've updated the station?

Would you mind providing a screen grab?

 

[hellron]

just to confirm, my stupid fault, its the airport extreme im talking about.

if thats you too, then it has been updated to the newest firmware but just the standard apple download not using a US on, ill happily stick a screen grab up but im at work at the moment.

but go to airport utility thing, click on the airport extreme, then click manual setup, then click wireless, then click wireless option, that should give you the option.

however from memory it does depend on how you are running you AE because when i set mine up i have a recolection with some configurations you didnt get the option.

mine is set up as a new wireless network and is wired into an older router which connect to the net.

hope that helped, ill put a screen grab up later today.

 

[hellron]

open airport utility

select wireless

select wireless options

select country and change to somewhere other than UK swiss is ok.

that pops the button up to use wide channel, select it click done and update you AE.

thats it job done you should see much better speeds, i certainly did, and my mobile phoe and microwave still work!!!!!!

 

[4np]

In contrast to the TS, I am looking for the European firmware for the Airport Express. I have been abroad for half a year and I bought an Airport Express in the USA. Now that I am using it here (The Netherlands) I cannot set it to The Netherlands which means it will not be able to work on the frequencies allowed here.

Is I am pretty sure this must be firmware defined it should probably be soleable by flashing it with the European firmware. I already tried to upload the 7.3.2 firmware using the standard way in Airport Utility, however nothing changed so I am assuming Aiport Utility downloaded the US version and not the European one.

Also, when setting up a 802.11b/g network only the US channels show (1-11) instead of the channels allowed here (1-13):

Does anybody have the 7.3.2 Dutch or (other?) European Airport Express firmware lying around?



Cheers

 

[hellron]

im not sure of the problem, 4np, i assume the issue you have is not that you want the higher 5GHz setting and that you want the european firmware? but im assuming that in the netherlands your allowed to use channel 1-13? thats my guess from your post, so with the US firmware you only have 1-11, but that still includes 11 channels your allowed to use in the ntherlands?

so if you wanted to make sure your not breaking any laws in the netherlands, you can be because you have more channels availible to you by law than you have access to, so using 1-11 is fine.

perhaps i have misunderstood your problem, but i cant really see one. incidently i checked my EU extreme and if i set the country to netherlands i still have the option to use the wide channels setting, that implies if you set it to 5GHz on wireless N it will force the channels option to automatic, and you should be fine as the auto channel must be within your countries legal channels.

hope that helped and i didnt completeley miss the point!!

 

[4np]

Hi Hellron, thanks for your reply. You are absolutely right that I am indeed able to use some channels I am allowed to use here. However, I am also unable to use certain other channels because they are not available in the airport express. To quote the Apple specs:

Channels
Channels 1-11, 36-48, and 149-165 approved for use in the United States and Canada
Channels 1-13 and 36-64 approved for use in Japan
Channels 1-13 and 36-140 approved for use in Europe
Channels 1-13, 36-64, and 149-165 approved for use in Australia, Hong Kong, and New Zealand

This means I cannot use channel 12 & 13 of the 802.11b/g spec, and I cannot use 49-140 (a huge range) of the 802.11n spec. The airport express does allow 149-165, however as I have a European MacBook Pro those channels will not be available to me.

So using the US firmware on the Airport Express actually limits it in it's use. Of course I can use the other channels available, but I would prefer an unlimited device.

So I was wondering how to solve this issue....

 

[mavis]

So I was wondering how to solve this issue....

Any updates on this?

I'm in Japan, with a shiny new AEBS, limited to 130Mbps because we can't use wide channels here ...

Any workarounds?

 

[skorpien]

Any updates on this?

I'm in Japan, with a shiny new AEBS, limited to 130Mbps because we can't use wide channels here ...

Any workarounds?

Have you selected a country other than Japan from the drop down list in "Wireless Options"?

 

[mavis]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G (white): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)

Any updates on this?

I'm in Japan, with a shiny new AEBS, limited to 130Mbps because we can't use wide channels here ...

Any workarounds?

Have you selected a country other than Japan from the drop down list in "Wireless Options"?

No, Japan is the only country in the drop-down list.

 

[applevx]

Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3G (white): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20)



No, Japan is the only country in the drop-down list.

Sorry to keep this topic alive. I am the same situation here as well. So please someone gives some idea.

IMO, maybe upload another firmware can help solving this problem. But how?
I checked apple's web site, and no luck to get such firmware alone.
So, I guess maybe we have to do some deeper hack this AirMac Extreme Base station.


Any help will be very appreciated!

 

[4np]

I still haven't resolved the US AE issue in Europe and it looks like I'm not alone with this. Anybody got a clue? I assume that either the AE's sold in different locations (eg. USA, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc) either have region based firmware or they all use the same firmware with some location setting stored in the device itself. Anybody got a clue how to change the AE location / region from USA to Europe?

For example, if I set the AE to use the 5Ghz band I cannot connect to it. Because the USA uses channels 36-48 and 149-165 while in Europe 36-140 are allowed. So my MBP cannot connect to the AE as both devices use different channels.... :S

No solutions here though...

 

[radioactive]

I still haven't resolved the US AE issue in Europe and it looks like I'm not alone with this. Anybody got a clue? I assume that either the AE's sold in different locations (eg. USA, Europe, Japan, Australia, etc) either have region based firmware or they all use the same firmware with some location setting stored in the device itself. Anybody got a clue how to change the AE location / region from USA to Europe?

For example, if I set the AE to use the 5Ghz band I cannot connect to it. Because the USA uses channels 36-48 and 149-165 while in Europe 36-140 are allowed. So my MBP cannot connect to the AE as both devices use different channels.... :S

No solutions here though...

This is not exactly true.

Apple Airport card uses 802.11d in the beacon advertised by the AP to set the regulatory domain for network access. I have a US MBP, and travel between Germany and Australia nearly every month. When I fire up my laptop (now in Germany), and look through the console log, I see:

Sep 1 08:19:25 salamander kernel[0]: en1: 802.11d country code set to 'DE'.
Sep 1 08:19:25 salamander kernel[0]: en1: Supported channels 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 36 40 44 48 52 56 60 64 100 104 108 112 116 120 124 128 132 136 140

The AP I'm connected to uses 2.4 GHz channel 12, which would be normally unavailable if my SS detected I was in the US regulatory domain.

Really this isn't a firmware issue - Apple just needs to set the .11d bits in the beacon, the hardware is (mostly) the same for all the Airports made worldwide.

You can also find this information under the system profiler under the Airport
Locale:
Country Code: