Airport Extreme Base Station question

[GabooN]

Hey guys, I've reading around and something isn't quite clear.

Right now my room mate has a macbook, with the intel core duo (not the core 2 duo), so only has wireless g capabilities.

I will be buying a new macbook (with wireless n) in the near future, and he will be getting an iMac (n) as well.

If we bought the new AEBS, the two new macs would connect fine, but would the old macbook with wireless g be able to connect to the network?

I've read that it wont be able to and I've read that it should work so I'm trying to clarify before we explore other options.

Basically, if it is running at N, can older standards connect or would the network have to be running at G in order for all three machines to be connected.

Thanks

 

[stomer]

Basically, if it is running at N, can older standards connect or would the network have to be running at G in order for all three machines to be connected.

Thanks

You can set your base station to run G and N at the same time, but N wont run as fast as it would if you were to set your base station to N only.

 

[MrT8064]

You can set your base station to run G and N at the same time, but N wont run as fast as it would if you were to set your base station to N only.

It depends which country you are in, in lots of european countries you can't legally run it at the maximum speed (5ghz) - so running B, G, N will make no difference to speed.

I bought an Extreme base station, and out of 4 computers in the house, mine is the only one with N technology, i can confirm that the new base station (in the same position as my old Netgear) has increased range for the G users!

 

[GabooN]

Awesome thanks guys

That pretty much solves the problem then, we were trying to avoid having multiple devices, and wanted to both be able to put drives on the network so we could backup with time machine automatically whenever we were on the network instead of constantly plugging in the drives.

I'm in Canada btw, and have Bell Sympatico DSL

 

[macleod199]

It depends which country you are in, in lots of european countries you can't legally run it at the maximum speed (5ghz) - so running B, G, N will make no difference to speed.

I bought an Extreme base station, and out of 4 computers in the house, mine is the only one with N technology, i can confirm that the new base station (in the same position as my old Netgear) has increased range for the G users!

Just a nit, 5 GHz isn't the 'speed', it's the band. It's roughly analagous to the difference between VHF and UHF TV. UHF has more channels because at higher bands there's just more space, but the transmission range isn't as good. Same deal with 2.4 GHz and 5.x GHz wifi.

The deal with Europe is that some countries won't allow you to do 'wide channels' at 5 GHz (i.e. combining two adjacent channels), but you can still use regular channels at 5 GHz in all countries, so far as I know. That's why they say "2.5x" as fast instead of "5x" as fast, because it doesn't have the double wide channels in those countries.

Meanwhile, at 2.4 GHz, b, g, and n WILL make a difference. Whenever a g client is transmitting or receiving, all clients will slow down. It will be even worse if a b client is active. However, as soon as the b/g goes quiet, the n client can pick it up to about 90% of its maximum 'n only' speed at 2.4 GHz.

Other things to note - 5 Ghz doesn't have as good a range at the same power level, and doesn't penetrate walls as well, but the lack of interference from other networks, microwaves, cordless phones, bluetooth, etc., may more than compensate.