This is what happened: he tweaked settings galore, hoping to squeeze out more performance somehow. Nerds tend to do this; it's natural.
However by removing the automatic settings and forcing it into one or more configurations that may have been suboptimal, performance actually decreased.
When he returned the settings to "fully automatic" everything was fine and dandy and maximal.
Moral of the story (and I quote): "Resist the urge to tinker with these settings."
You can basically ignore everything except that last line—and if you're familiar with the excellent AirPort Extreme, you probably already knew that.
The problem is that there is no particular reason those configurations are suboptimal, except the empirical "it makes the router run slower." Enforcing 802.11n for instance. If settings that should be good choices end up having side effects, that's not a great design of the Airport Extreme.
I don't get this behaviour with my (latest-gen) Airport Extreme. I have a separate 5GHz network and get consistently 360Mbps to 450Mbps connection to it. Are you sure your Airport isn't faulty?
Changing it to a single name for both networks leaves my iMac always connected via 2.4GHz and no obvious way to switch to 5GHz.
Are you sure? I don't have an iMac, but I've tested with two MBPs. They will always use the 5GHz network if it's available. This may have something to do with how good your connection to the airport is - does your signal quality say Excellent?
I can't say that this configuration change will help for everybody - I'm just reporting what I'm seeing.
He wasn't using the default settings. When he left everything on fully-automatic, it was all fine.
This is a classic case of someone geeking out over settings and over-optimizing themselves into a corner. Hence the last line of the article, and an excellent moral.
I'd like to know a little more about the network setup. Are the Expresses bridging via Ethernet, or acting as repeaters? I don't know if that could be part of what he's seeing, but I'm still interested.
This airport extreme is connected directly to outside (cable modem). There are several airport expresses extending the network (I have no idea how to tell if the client devices are connected directly to them, and I'm not sure it matters). There is a second airport extreme bridged to that one, which is running a dedicated 802.11g network to keep those devices off the same network as the faster devices.
When it comes to any mass-market consumer product, 99% of the users (I'm exaggerating, no, probably not) will leave all settings at the default. Therefore the default settings have orders of magnitude more real-world testing than all non-default setting combinations COMBINED. Nearly any mature product is therefore bound to behave dramatically better on its default settings than in any other configuration in sheer defiance of what "should" happen.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
This is what happened: he tweaked settings galore, hoping to squeeze out more performance somehow. Nerds tend to do this; it's natural.
However by removing the automatic settings and forcing it into one or more configurations that may have been suboptimal, performance actually decreased.
When he returned the settings to "fully automatic" everything was fine and dandy and maximal.
Moral of the story (and I quote): "Resist the urge to tinker with these settings."
You can basically ignore everything except that last line—and if you're familiar with the excellent AirPort Extreme, you probably already knew that.
[+] [-] smackfu|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weiran|13 years ago|reply
Changing it to a single name for both networks leaves my iMac always connected via 2.4GHz and no obvious way to switch to 5GHz.
[+] [-] fields|13 years ago|reply
I can't say that this configuration change will help for everybody - I'm just reporting what I'm seeing.
[+] [-] calinet6|13 years ago|reply
This is a classic case of someone geeking out over settings and over-optimizing themselves into a corner. Hence the last line of the article, and an excellent moral.
[+] [-] eddieroger|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fields|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] svachalek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fields|13 years ago|reply
http://prolost.com/blog/2011/3/28/your-new-tv-ruins-movies.h...
[+] [-] jeffehobbs|13 years ago|reply