Previous to my Airport Extreme I was using a very old airport express model that only did 802.11b/g. This was necessary as there are a bunch of deices around here (namely my iPhone) that wont connect to an n network and I guess I didn't realize just how much faster that was. I had experimented with using both airports to extend my network and get better coverage, but only on b/g. After reading something on the internet that it was better to keep the older model on b/g mode and run the extreme in n 5GHz mode I gave it a try and initially I thought it was fantastic. The speed for file sharing and stuff was really much improved and even the internet speed felt better though in that case the cable modem is the problem not the wireless speed. Unfortunately I shortly began to suffer from the problem of dropping the connection that is all over the apple discussion boards. It would work fine for a short time and then just stop. The airport menu would still show full bars and think it was connected but no network traffic would go through at all. Sometimes turning the airport off and back on again would make it reconnect for a few more minutes, sometimes not. Sometimes it would work for hours before cutting off and sometimes only seconds.
I couldn't find a solution anywhere so just decided to mess with it a bit before giving up and putting the express back into b/g mode. The solution appears to be to set a specific channel and not select "auto". Except that by default you cannot select a channel when in n 5ghz mode. But if you hold down the option key while selecting the popup menu then you can! SInce selecting a single channel I have not had it drop the connection once in the last week or so.
of course you might have to play with the channel selection to make it reliable with other radio sources and other base stations in the area then, but so far that hasn't been a problem here.
Ryan McLean (unauthenticated)
Oct 4, 2009 2:05 PM
We're having some problems here at home as well. I have the Extreme running in 5ghz only (Helpful, as there are no fewer than 11 b/g networks showing up on my Airport menu as we speak), and then an Express hanging off it running g for my iPhone.
I /think/ the problem is really with our internet connection, but I just set then Channel to 149 (The channel it was operating on under "Automatic" -- which I found out by option-clicking the airport menu) and we'll see if that helps.
James Sentman
Oct 5, 2009 8:38 PM
Thats pretty much exactly my setup, the 5Ghz was for high speed to the laptop and the old express was serving up b/g for the iPhone and the wireless printer which don't do 5Ghz. Forcing the channel to stay put has, I think, completely solved the dropped connection issue I was having. Course, right after I wrote this it might have dropped once more, but it came back before I changed networks and it never did that before so it was probably a separate issue... SO many separate issues... Let me know what happens,
James Sentman
Dec 2, 2009 11:12 AM
on longer term testing this turns out not to be a perfect solution. It definitely works better, but I've still had to switch networks once in a while even when it says I've got good signal strength. No idea whats up with that, but it's quite frustrating.