From the Dark Side--M$ Sued Over European Music Services

[Update 1a EDT 10/13] Hands-On Report--Get the Most Out of AirPort Extreme: We decided to replace our snow AirPort Base Station (ABS) with Apple's new Extreme ABS and use the snow ABS as our traveling companion. Our attraction to the Extreme ABS was simple: its higher rated speed, it can serve as a router on a wired/wireless network and amplifying antennas are easy to connect.

Our initial experience with the Extreme ABS was an incredible disaster with the exceedingly poor throughput writen about in numerous reviews. Fortunately, with some help from a set AppleCare technicians, which at the time given it was unappreciated, and a few other tweaks our Extreme ABS performs very well. If you want to skip our detective story, the bottom line is we found that our LinkSys 5-port 10/100 switches (EZX55W ver. 2.0) are incompatible with the AirPort Extreme Base Station using firmware through ver. 5.1.3 and AirPort Software ver. 3.1.1. The last paragraph also contains additional advice for obtaining top performance from AirPort Extreme.

The specified throughput of the Extreme ABS running the new 802.11g protocol is on the order of 5 times faster than the 802.11b protocol of the snow and original graphite ABS's. In theory the advantage is 54 mbps vs 11 mbps (mbps = megabits per second) but the actual realized throughput is more like 25 mbps vs 5 mbps under optimal conditions. That is still roughly a 5 times difference and very attractive since we frequently pass large files among the computers on our network, especially between a 1 GHz 17" PowerBook G4 (Big Al) on ABS and our hard-wired server, a G4 Cube.

Our network consists of an Asante FriendlyNet 3002AL router connected to a BroadMax DSL "modem" fed by Earthlink's internet service. Attached to the router were two 5-port LinkSys 10/100 switches (EZXS55W ver. 2.0) which were hard-wired to several desktop computers and the snow ABS. The ABS feeds another G4 Cube desktop in an adjacent room about 20 feet from the ABS and several PowerBooks and iBooks that are used about the building, including outside on a deck some 40-50 feet from the ABS. We thought that we could replace the Asante router with the Extreme ABS and reduce the number of electronic components in our network. We haven't done this yet but we did determine that with our DSL service it is not the simple plug-and-play exercise that it probably would be with cable internet. This will be the subject of a future article.

We also planned to get a directional antenna, perhaps one like the ExtendAIR Direct sold by Dr Bott, with the hope of getting a solid 4 bars and faster throughout from out on the deck off a lower floor. With the snow and graphiite ABS's we currently get 2-3 bars with our laptops at the extreme end of the deck, about 50 feet from the ABS. We get a solid 4 or 3-4 bars throughout the wood frame building within a radius of 30 feet or so, even with our ex-TiBooks and our current Big Al.

When we replaced the snow ABS with the Extreme ABS we were horrified to discover that the web surfing throughput, which had run some 300-700 kbps at our reference location using Big Al, had dropped to UNDER 20 kbps as measured by CNet's and BandwidthPlace's bandwidth tests. The reference location, an easy chair in front of an entertainment center, is just 25 feet and one floor away from the ABS and has always provided mostly a solid 4 bars. With the Extreme ABS, the menu meter varied from 1-3 bars, but mostly 1-2. Even contacting the Extreme ABS with the AirPort Admin Utility was agonizingly slow, sometimes taking several minutes to display the Extreme ABS's configuration page.

After trying two PowerBooks and an iBook with Extreme or original AirPort cards and getting the same result whether the Extreme ABS was set to the 802.11g or 802.11b or 802.11b/g protocol, we concluded that the ABS had to be defective. Afterall, just simply replacing it with a snow or graphite ABS produced the throughput we have been accustomed to on all PowerBooks and the iBook. None of our usual performance tweaks worked, i.e. changing channels and rebooting the ABS. A hard reset fixed the signal strength problem and we got 4 bars at our reference location. The Extreme ABS still took longer than the snow or graphite ABS's to report its configuration page in the AirPort Admin Utility but the lag is in seconds, not minutes. Despite this success, the Extreme ABS's throughput remained extremely poor.

So we called AppleCare with the hope of getting a replacement Extreme ABS pronto. We explained what we had found through our testing but, as usual, the tech had to go through his checklist before he could authorize a replacement. We must say that this has always silently grated on us because usually we have already done every test they ask us to repeat and have eliminated the usual newbie possibilities. But no longer, we are eating humble pie here as we will explain.

We completed every initial test, all of which failed to help of course because we had tried them already, and came to the last one: disconnect our Asante router and LinkSys switches and hook up the Extreme ABS directly to our DSL "modem". As noted above, we had tried this earlier without success but we spent over an hour with the tech trying to get a signal through the Extreme ABS and no joy. The tech said he could not authorize a replacement unless we could hook up the Extreme ABS directly and the bandwidth was still poor. We thought this was unreasonable and asked for and got to speak to a senior tech.

The senior tech was also adamant--no replacement without doing the last test. We discussed the technical and practical reasons for this at length, given the snow and graphite ABS's worked fine, and we must remark on his amazing patience and calm demeanor as we discussed the finer points at length. But he was intransigent to the point that we began to wonder if, indeed, Apple knew that the Extreme ABS was not compatible with some network gear. He said he had no information on this but still insisted on the test. So after nearly 2 hours on the phone with AppleCare, we took the names of the two techs, accepted a case number, vowed to call them back when we had completed the last test and parted on friendly terms.

We hooked up our Extreme ABS's modem to our phone line. We dialed up Earthlink and, lo and behold, we got twice the throughput than when it was on our network...hmmmm. We took it to the Apple Store for a genius to try on the Store's network and to be closer to getting a replacement than calling AppleCare back--the Extreme BS checked out fine. We were now convinced that, in fact, there is an incompatibility between the Extreme ABS and some hardware in our network, an incompatibility that for some reason does not exist with the snow and graphite base stations.

While munching on humble pie, we first hooked up the Extreme ABS directly to the Asante router, bypassing the 5-port LinkSys switch that the ABS's have been on. Boom! The Extreme ABS's throughput was as strong as expected. A bad switch we thought, so we tried inserting the other 5-port LinkSys switch and the throughput dropped again to virtually nil. It's either two bad 5-port LinkSys 10/100 switches, which is unlikely, or the Extreme ABS is simply incompatible with the LinkSys auto-sensing switches, probably somewhere in the connection negotiation protocols (duplex and/or speed). [Update: Reader Skip Schiffer notes that it is likely a failure of the duplex negotiation, half or full, because that is a general issue that exists among network manufacturers. It can be fixed by setting the duplex manually but not on inexpensive auto-sensing switches that can not be managed like the LinkSys models.]

Glad that it wasn't the Asante router, we rushed to our local Micro Center and picked up an SMC Barricade 8-port 10/100 switch (EZ6508TX) for virtually nothing after instant and mail in rebates. Fortunately, our Extreme ABS works well with the SMC switch inserted in the network. The web bandwidth tests from Big Al at the reference location frequent the same 700-1000 kbps range that the wired desktops get as compared with 300-700 kbps range Big Al and previous PowerBooks got with the snow and graphite ABS's. It appears to us that we are seeing less attenuation of the internet signal through AirPort with the Extreme ABS and Extreme cards, just as we had hoped. However, we will be doing some explicit network throughput tests and will report on them in a subsequent article.

Why would the LinkSys switches work with the snow and graphite ABS's and not the Extreme ABS? We guess that it is an issue in the connection negotiation protocols, probably the duplex setting as noted above, between the auto-sensing ethernet port in the Extreme ABS and those in the LinkSys switches. This may mean that all LinkSys gear with auto-sensing ports could have a problem with the Extreme ABS. It also means that Apple might be able to fix it in a firmware update.

We also use other tweaks to keep AirPort performance as high as possible. Here is our advice:

• First, we have found that some channels offer better throughput than others. Unfortunately, the top channels change over time, at least in our location. So if we are not getting peak performance, we try one or two other channels at least 3 away and usually find one to be much better.