Airport Extreme and Express

[ndmccormack]

I'm thinking of buying an airport extreme to take advantage of the faster speed and also the disk/printer sharing that it allows, however I am worried that if I use an airport express aswell fro music streaming then it may not operate at full (n) speed.

The way I understand wireless to work is that if you connect an 802.11g device to a 802.11n device then the n device will slow to g-speed to accommodate the older bit of hardware. Is this correct? I use my airport express a lot for streaming music and don't want my wireless to operate at g-speeds if I spend my money on an n-speed wireless router.

Any help would be appreciated

Cheers
Niall

 

[flopticalcube]

Not g speed but you go from 300mbps to 130mbps whereas g is 54mbps.

 

[ndmccormack]

Not g speed but you go from 300mbps to 130mbps whereas g is 54mbps.

Is this because it goes from using two wireless channels to one? Seems a strange drop!

 

[flopticalcube]

Is this because it goes from using two wireless channels to one? Seems a strange drop!

I think its because its forced into a 2.4GHz mode. See this review:

http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/airportn

AirPort Utility configures the base station to use the 2.4 GHz frequency range by default, running in "mixed mode" to support 802.11b/g clients. 802.11n also supports an "n-only" 2.4 GHz mode. We found that throughput on the 2.4 GHz spectrum was less than half that for 5 GHz.