Features

• USB port to plug a printer into, lets the Airport become a wireless print server
• WPA/WPA2 Security with 128-bit WEP
• Guest Networking – you can create a secondary wireless network (‘John’s Guest Network’) with a different password or no password at all.
• Dual band
• Supports up to 50 users simultaneously

Looks like a good solution for retail shop, classroom, or busy home.

BTW It’s currently on sale at Amazon
Apple AirPort Extreme Base Station (Simultaneous Dual-Band) (MC340LL/A)

As I finish up the third day of frustrating testing with the Netgear WNR 3500 Wireless-N Gigabit router, I’ve come to a simple realization: There just aren’t enough channels at 2.4 Ghz to make 300 Mbps wireless N work.

Wireless-G has 11 channels (conveniently numbered 1 thru 11). There does seem to be a bit of a bleed into adjacent channels, so if your neighbor has a router at channel 6, you may not be able to set yours to channel 5 or 7 and get reliable connections.

Wireless N gets to 300 Mbps by combining 4 adjacent channels into one big, fast 300 Mbps channel. So the channel options become more limited:
Channels 1 – 4, 2 – 5, 3 – 6, 4 to 7, 5 to 8, 6 to 10, and 7 to 11. So there are only 7 possible choices.

But where it gets difficult is if you have neighbors or interference in any of the 802.11 channels. If channel 3 is being used by a neighbor, then you only have 2 choices:
6-10 or 7-10.

If you have a neighbor on channel 3 and a neighbor on channel 7, then you don’t have any choices, aside from upgrading to dual-band wireless N, which will give you channels and 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz.

Why is WLAN still so slow? How come wireless-N products don’t test significantly faster than plain old 802.11G?

I’ve been doing lots of performance testing of WLAN products and writing up the results on my blog (www.bohannontech.com). I was excited at first because I bought some nice new 802.11N 270Mbps products from all of the major brands, Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, and Trend. These products often show a connection speed of 270Mbps, but the actual speeds of file copies is terrible – some as slow as 6 Mbps, and this is with 2 computers in the same room. When I run the same tests with wired Ethernet, I will consistently get 80Mbps.

Has anyone been able to get a real performing wireless-N setup and if so, can you recommend any products?

These are the great responses I received, thanks again to everyone that helped out!

http://www.linkedin.com/answers/technology/wireless/TCH_WIR/373905-19281169

So I’ve got a NETGEAR recommended solution here – two Wireless-N Products and they are literally sitting on top of each other. This should be the best case scenario for NETGEAR.

I couldnt even get it to connect with the default settings! 802.11N Channel 36 (5.180Ghz) must be a busy place. I must have tried 4 or 5 other 11N channels before I finally found out that I could connect on channel 157.

To someone not familar with this device (me!) it would be very difficult to get a 270MB connection out of the box. What I would do differently next time is make the SSID for 11G and 11N different, and then go about finding all the broken 1N channels in my house. Then I’d set the SSID’s to be the same and you’d be all set with a dual band AP. Good luck with that.

So connected at 11N, with my connection speed showing 270Mbps (looks impressive btw) my performance tests clock the connection at a measly 29Mbps. I ran the test a few times and got the exact same speed.

For completeness I configured the same PC to connect to the 11G SSID on the AP. The connection showed a perfect 54MB connection. I was really suprised to find out that my file copy test only got 9Mbps! The file copy test ran faster 2 floors apart than 2 inches apart.
I noticed that the NETGEAR packages have stopped making any speed promises. That’s probably a good idea when two 802.11N products 2 inches apart can’t get anywhere near 100MB Ethernet speed.

Well the WNDR3300 AP has alot of claims on the packaging: 15X speed, 10X coverage, interference avoidance, EIGHT internal antennas.

This is the first 802.11N AP I’ve tried so I had to do some research. 802.11 draft standard N basically means more antennas . This feature is called Multiple-Input Multiple-Output or MIMO.

Dual Band means that it works at can work at either 2.4Ghz or 5Ghz. This is how these products can avoid interference – they can move to whatever frequency works the best. 2.4Ghz is the standard 802.11B/G Frequency and alot of other consumers products (microwave ovens) can interfere with 2.4.

Since I have a problematic basement office I need to connect to, I’m very interested in both the interference avoidance and MIMO features.

Unfortunately, like most fancy wireless APs if you want to get all of the claimed benefits, you gotta use a matching adapters in your desktop PC.

So if you dont have the recommended adapters (WN511B, WN311B, WN111, WNDA3100) your really just going to end up with an 802.11G AP with MIMO (lots of antennas!)

So the performance results…

NETGEAR WNDR3300 <—-> NETGEAR WPNT121 (Rangemax 240) I averaged about 10Mbps. With my older Dell 54G AP I averaged about 9Mbps with the same adapter.

With the recommended NETGEAR WNDA3100 adapter I averaged about 12Mbps and by using a USB extension cable so I could move the USB adapter around I got almost 14Mbps.

Note: The WNDR3300 manual claims that you have to use WPA2-PSK (AES) encryption or else you wont get maximum performance. So I also tested the speed using that encryption setting, it remained at ~14mbps.