Apple released a new Airport Extreme earlier this year, with a dual band antenna. This may not sound all that special, but it allows the unit to broadcast an 802.11n network and an 802.11g network with the same SSID (network name) and run each network at full speed. Typically when you run a mixed-mode network, and a slower device joins, the whole network slows down to accommodate it.

As my iPhone only runs on 802.11g, I had given up on running my 802.11n network at full speed – until I read a paper written by a guy trying to solve this very problem. Sadly, I can’t find a link to it now. In short, you simply run two devices: one with an 802.11n network and one with an 802.11g network. You make sure the frequency’s (2.4 ghz and 5ghz) don’t overlap, assign the same SSIDs and passwords, and you’re in business. One is set to run a DHCP server, and the other is set to bridge the wired network. One is plugged into the other, and then from the end user’s point of view, it’s the same network. Since you are bridging one network to the other, from the network it’s a transparent shift as well.

It’s an elegant solution, other than the fact that you can’t do range extension (WDS) with the Airport’s anymore. I realized that we don’t need the range extension I had setup with our Airport Express, as this house isn’t that big, and I never bothered to use the XBox, which would benefit from using the bridged network mode of the Airport Express. Further, I really wanted the backups run over the wireless network to be faster and video playback to be smoother, and I wanted to get my iPhone on wireless at home. 10 or 15 minutes of fiddling around until I got all the settings the way I wanted them, and I was done. It would have been a lot faster if I didn’t have to reboot the devices every time I made a configuration change.