Thinking of purchasing an Airport Extreme

[Lurk]

I'm thinking of purchasing the 802.11n airport extreme base station to replace my linksys 802.11n wrt160n. I have the 2nd version of the router, which is currently unsupported by dd-wrt, so there's really nothing else I can do atm to improve network performance.

I did a little research with wireless n networks and found out that having wireless b/g clients on the network brings down performance to b/g level. Please correct me if I'm wrong/misunderstanding this.

I looked at Apple's wireless n base station, which has simultaneous dual band. I'm guessing this is something that'll grant me the full performance of wireless n? Are there any quirks or anything I should know about this?

Would I be seeing a noticeable upgrade going from that linksys router to this? Regarding performance, are there any other routers in the same price range($250 and below) that would provide noticeable/significant performance over the Airport Extreme?

Also, after ditching the poor performing linksys n router, I switched back to my airport express 802.11n running on 2.4ghz as my main base station. I'm curious if I'll be seeing noticeable performance going from the airport express to the airport extreme?

Thanks!

 

[flopticalcube]

Are you connecting multiple devices to the network that will be talking to each other or is the router solely for internet access and, if so, what is your link speed? The 5GHz band is fairly interference free and you can potentially get up to 300mbps out of it in n only mode. In mixed mode (n/g) the maximum an n device can get is 130mbps, less if a g device is on the network.

 

[Lurk]

There are multiple devices connected to the network. They primarily use the router for internet access, but there are many occasions where we transfer files through the network. My MacBook Pro is the only device on the network that uses wireless n, I do intend on getting another apple computer in the near future. All other devices in my house are wireless g.

I'm not sure how to determine link speed, but judging from AP grapher I'm getting 130mbps.

I also recently found out my budget allows for the 500gb time capsule. Is there any difference in wireless/lan performance from the airport extreme? Is there anything I should know about the time capsule before making my purchase?

Thanks again! I'm hoping to make my purchase tomorrow, thanks for the input!

 

[J&JPolangin]

I would take the money you plan to use for the time capsule and get an AEBS and a good 1TB eHDD to attach to it...

I'm setting this up tonight at my house...only difference, I have an iMac, eeePC1000H (which are my "N" machines) and 3 other winXP "G" devices and my iPod Touch on my network...

I also like the guest network feature the new AEBS has for when friends come over with their own devices.

 

[hellfire88]

The newer Airport Extremes/Time Capsules are nice since they support dual-simulateneous bands. Yes when you set an N router to support b/g/n it brings down the performance of N clients to around G speeds (weakest link etc.). So with these newer Airport Extreme/Time Capsules, you can run a 5GHz N-only band for your N devices (MBP, etc.) and b/g 2.4GHz for everything else, and enjoy the 5GHz (mostly interference free) speed on N-only while support your older stuff. Note that 5GHz 802.11N is great and all for interference + speed, but the caveat of it is range, its quite a bit shorter than 802.11g.