the secret to a good 802.11n

April 2nd, 2007

The secret to using the new Airport Extreme 802.11n base station seems to be choosing a good channel.

I’ve got 3 802.11n machines on my local network, unfortunately one of them is a US-chipset, which only works on channels 1-11. The ‘n’ draft spec goes up to channel 15(?) so if I set the network to n-only and channel to “auto”, it will default to a high channel and my laptop won’t play.

I set it to n-only with a fixed channel so everyone is happy, but then my iMac randomly, mysteriously, and persistently drops off every now and again (although, more than just dropping off, it seems that the airport card literally freaks out - yesterday it went into bridge mode and wouldn’t switch off, I had to literally reboot my machine something I haven’t done since like 2006 sometime).

I could just do the simple thing and roll the network back to 802.11g only until n is ratified, but where’s the fun in that I ask you? And besides, ‘g’ is so last year. It’s all about the ‘n’.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 2nd, 2007 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Apple, General, security, tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “the secret to a good 802.11n”

  1. rdas7 Says:
    May 4th, 2007 at 2:56 am

    The secret to a good 802.11n is getting good drivers. Apple have recently released a bunch of updates for Airport, and finally all this equipment is working as it should: transparently. No fiddling required.

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