time to upgrade the 2nd generation apple airport express


It appears I’m not getting any sort of 802.11N benefit with my 5 year old 2nd generation apple airport extreme. I thought you could get up to 130Mbps. I can only think that there is a good amount of wireless interference on the 2.4Ghz spectrum. Performance really dropped 30ft away in another room with a few walls in the way. I think getting a dual band router will improve performance, especially if I can use the xbox on the 802.11A range. I would like to look to utilize the xbox360 as a TV tuner..but I really really do not want to run cat5e around the place. I currently can only run the airport extreme in either 2.4 or 5ghz, and the oldish airport express only supports 2.4ghz.

with my LAN connected PC doing a local iperf test

$ iperf -c 10.0.1.13
————————————————————
Client connecting to 10.0.1.13, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 10.0.1.13 port 23572 connected with 10.0.1.13 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 5.30 GBytes 4.55 Gbits/sec

from my mbp > my desktop via 802.11N (B/G)

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 35.9 MBytes 30.0 Mbits/sec

from my mbp > my desktop via 802.11N (A)

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 4] 0.0-10.0 sec 57.4 MBytes 48.1 Mbits/sec

from readynas to my pc via gigabit ethernet LAN:

READYNAS:~# iperf -c 10.0.1.13
————————————————————
Client connecting to 10.0.1.13, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 21.8 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 5] local 10.0.1.250 port 3420 connected with 10.0.1.13 port 5001
[ 5] 0.0-10.0 sec 127 MBytes 107 Mbits/sec

from my PC > readynas over gigabit ethernet LAN

[ 3] local 10.0.1.13 port 23672 connected with 10.0.1.250 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 31.7 MBytes 26.5 Mbits/sec

from my work win7 laptop > desktop PC via apple aiport express LAN interface (next room over)

$ iperf -c 10.0.1.13
————————————————————
Client connecting to 10.0.1.13, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 10.0.1.45 port 1316 connected with 10.0.1.13 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 10.2 MBytes 8.52 Mbits/sec

from my work win7 laptop > desktop PC via 802.11N(B/G) (next room over)

$ iperf -c 10.0.1.13
————————————————————
Client connecting to 10.0.1.13, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 10.0.1.46 port 1389 connected with 10.0.1.13 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 28.0 MBytes 23.4 Mbits/sec

from my work win7 laptop > desktop PC via 802.11N(B/G) (directly next to airport extreme)

$ iperf -c 10.0.1.13
————————————————————
Client connecting to 10.0.1.13, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 64.0 KByte (default)
————————————————————
[ 3] local 10.0.1.46 port 1450 connected with 10.0.1.13 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[ 3] 0.0-10.0 sec 71.7 MBytes 60.1 Mbits/sec


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