So let’s compare the Gen 5 to other current three-stream capable routers like, say, the Cisco Linksys E4200 and NETGEAR WNDR4000, both of which use also use the Broadcom BCM4331. The 4th Generation AirPort Extreme didn’t officially support three-stream N and I wasn’t set up to test three-stream either. Test Descriptionįigure 6 shows the IxChariot aggregate plots for WAN to LAN, LAN to WAN and simultaneous routing throughput tests, which look generally steady. There’s also a big improvement in simultaneous session handling with the 5th gen AirPortX able to open 29,413 sessions before pooping out, vs. Table 1 shows that the new Extreme’s routing speed is about the same for downlink and improved by 100 Mbps for uplink. To make it easy, though, I’ve pulled both sets of numbers into Table 1 below. If you want to compare the 5th and 4th gen AirPorts, you’ll need to click the Archived Products Switch To Show link to see the 4th gen numbers. At least for the port forwarding, advanced users can set separate public and private port numbers.Īll testing was done with the latest 7.5.2 firmware loaded and the 5.5.3 AirPort Utility. All you get is static port forwarding for single ports or ranges as well as DMZ. On the routing side, if you’re looking for any sort of web filtering or inbound / outbound service control, forget it. For non-Macers this feature is of limited use anyway, because it supports only FAT32 and HFS formatted drives only. But when I ran the robocopy routine, which copies a folder of files from a ripped DVD, the connection still went missing when robocopy got to a 1 GB VOB file. I was able to get the FAT-formatted disk to be recognized and mapped to the Win 7 NAS testbed system. I had the same result as for the Gen 4 model when I tried to measure the performance of the USB drive sharing feature. You also still have to press the Control key before clicking the Wireless Security dropdown selector to expose the WEP option, which is still marked as a "Transitional Security Network" That’s because Apple sets the same SSID on both radios, just to make things interesting. When you first fire up the router, your client won’t even see separate 2.4 and 5 GHz SSIDs. Note also that you can hide the radio SSIDs ("Create a closed network") and adjust transmit power, the same settings apply to both radios. And while it has its own wireless security settings, WEP isn’t among them. Next, note that the Guest Network runs on the 2.4 GHz band only. the 450 Mbps you’ll be able to see in 5 GHz. Note that this means that if you have a three-stream N capable client, you’re only going to see a maximum link rate of 217 Mbps vs. But in cases where there are no nearby networks or channel use can be coordinated, their use can be beneficial. While paternalistic, you’re not really losing that much, however."Wide" channels take up almost the whole 2.4 GHz band and provide significant bandwidth improvement only under strong signal conditions. The quick take is that the AirPort Extreme isn’t the router you’re looking for if you need flexible firewall features or like both your bands to be equally controllable.įirst, Apple is the lone holdout in blocking acces to 40 MHz bandwidth mode in the 2.4 GHz band. Since the main reason many of you are considering the AirPort Extreme is for better wireless performance, you should know what you’re trading off. The Missing list is a bit long and some items bear some further explanation or repeating.
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