That's what I thought, but it's more complicated. The airports seem to deteriorate as they're turned on. Say I plug the ae into the wall, with no connection to the cable modem. just brick alone. I jump on the airport network and ping the ae. pings come back around 2ms. A few minutes later, it's 8ms. 30 minutes later, it's 200ms. after an hour or so, it reaches upwards of 1000ms, and we start seeing about 20% packet loss. after 4-5 hours there's 100% packet loss. at this point i can't even use the Airport Admin Utility because it can't talk to the base station. Same with airtunes or plugging a usb printer into the airport. A factory reset reproduces the entire sequence. plugging in the cable modem doesn't seem to make a difference. and this occurs in exactly the same manner 2 base stations, one almost 2 years old (previously no problems), one brand new yesterday.
