Adventures in draft 802.11n
05-24-09
I finally had enough of 802.11g speeds. I use wireless almost exclusively at home and averaging around 10mbit for drive mounts was driving me absolutely batty and the obvious fix was 802.11n. The spec is still in draft at this time, however it’s widely available and I have some amount of faith that anything I purchase will be firmware upgradable to the final spec release.
My Macbook Pro is an older generation that didn’t have a draft N card installed by Apple. I’ve opened it up a couple times now for hard drive upgrades so popping the case wasn’t a big deal to me. A quick search on Ebay found an Apple draft-N card (Broadcom BCM94321MC chipset) that would fit in my machine for about $17. The two Lenovo laptops in the house are already N capable and all other machines will stay on 11g.
Having fixed up the Mac, I moved on to search for access points. The latest and greatest out these days appears to be simultaneous dual-band gear, allowing 802.11n operation on both 2.4ghz and 5ghz bands at the same time (access point side only). At first this seems a little pointless, but it has numerous advantages. 11g gear can ride on the 2.4ghz while you put all 11n gear on the 5ghz band. You can split out usage by service, putting all your multimedia on the 5ghz band and general workstations on the 2.4ghz. Basically, whatever works out best for you.
Having decided that simultaneous dual band was for me, I went out in search of gear capable of it. The top two contenders based on reviews, flexibility, my own crazy decision making, ended up being the Linksys WRT610N Simultaneous Dual-N Band Wireless Router
I was initially quite impressed with the AEBS, the Airport Utility configuration utility makes configuring the device a breeze. I was up and running in under five minutes and testing file transfer speeds from the file server. scp speeds through the device were running upwards of 90Mbit compared to 23Mbit (all tests were performed in the same room as the access points) on the old 11g access point. Setup for Time Machine was trivial, just formatted the disk on my Mac as a Mac filesystem, ejected, plugged it into the AEBS, went to the Airport Utility and configured it to export the disk (a very straightforward task in the utility). The drive pretty much immediately showed up in the Shared section in the Finder, after mounting it, I was able to go into Time Machine and point it at the drive.
This is where the honeymoon started to lose it’s appeal. I could only write to the Time Machine disk at about 40Mbit – certainly not horrible and considerably faster than I could do via an 11g network, it was disappointing. Given the lack of large volumes of data change usual on my Mac, after the initial backup, I don’t expect this to have a huge impact in usage and it certainly beats my prior setup. After the backup was completed, I finally decided to move the laptop and discovered that the AEBS had nowhere near the range of my old access point foring me to relocate the AEBS to a more central spot in the house that wasn’t available when the old access point was purchased.
Overall I’m pretty happy with the device, the original reason for purchase has been realized, but due to the range issues I’m likely going to have to buy an Airport Express to extend the network into a few spots that now have really light coverage. I did learn a trick while setting up the Airport that I wish wasn’t needed. If you want to lock it down to N only (I recommend this if you want to get full bandwidth out of your access point – note, 300Mbit draft-n will only net you about 100Mbit at the workstation), you need to be in manual setup and go into the wireless tab in the Airport Utility, hold down the option key, and click on Radio Mode. This will show you all possible options Apple allows for configuration.
