Friday 26 October 2012

Apple Airport Express is not limited to 10 users

Just wanted to counter the myth that the old-style Apple Airport Express is limited to 10 users.  I'm sure I've had more than that in the past.  Today I've had 16 devices connected to one of the older 801.11 B/G Airport Express units.

Friday 5 October 2012

SOLVED: Issues with 2012 Airport Express

Apple has updated their entry-level wireless access point, the Airport Express.  The new version is a nice little square white box, supporting simultaneous dual-band operation (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies) plus the new 802.11n (high speed) mode.

The first time I installed this device, using the default factory settings, there was a problem with backward compatibility for non-"n" wireless devices.   I found I had to disable "n" support in order for any non-"n" devices to be able to find the wireless network.   Even then, performance was slow: the device had trouble sustaining 1 Megabit of throughput.  Yet the 5 GHz channel worked fine.

In the end, this turned out to be due to a strong local interference source (probably some dodgy imported consumer gadget) that was interfering with channel 7.  Switching to channel 1 solved the problem.  I never did find out what was interfering with the middle channels.