Digital Trends

Apple AirPort Extreme

February 4th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Wireless Range & Signal Strength

Like most people, my wireless needs are pretty simple - my desk is 10 feet from my router. Range and signal are never an issue. If I need to go to another room with my laptop, the additional distance from the base station is negligible. Signal strength never loses more than one bar, even through 3-4 walls.

To test 802.11n range as best as I could, I set up my AirPort Extreme base station atop a tripod in the wide open outdoors and went for a stroll with my MacBook Pro.

I was amazed with the distance I was able to cover without dropping any signal strength. 150 feet - full signal. 200 feet - full signal. 250 feet - a momentary dip, then back to full signal. 300 feet (I could barely see the AirPort Extreme by this point) - full signal. Another 20 feet and the signal dropped to almost nothing. I looked up from my laptop and discovered that several people had crossed into my path, directly between the base station and my laptop. I shooed them out of the way and the signal went back up to full strength. I kept walking and found that my signal finally dropped to half strength by the time I had passed 350 feet.

I could have gone farther than 350 feet, I'm sure, but the road I was walking down began to curve and I lost sight of the AirPort Extreme base station.

In short, the distance tests for 802.11n is outstanding.


Speed Tests & AirPort Disk Utility

Wireless data rates can be dramatically affected by structural and electronic variables in your immediate area. Users' results will typically vary to greater or lesser degrees, therefore don't take the following test results as gospel. (To quote Apple's website, "Actual performance will vary based on range, connection rate, site conditions, size of network, and other factors. Range will vary with site conditions.")

Wired Benchmarks:

Prior to testing the 802.11n data transfer speeds between two 802.11n enabled computers (MacBook 2GHz Core 2 Duo and MacBook Pro 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo) on a local network, I tested the wired connections between the same computers for a frame of reference.

1. MacBook connected to MacBook Pro directly by a LAN cable, each with Gigabit ethernet. Average transfer speed of 650MB file = 20MB/s, with a top burst of 31MB/s.

2. MacBook connected to MacBook Pro by LAN cables via AirPort Extreme, using the base station's 10/100BASE-T ports. Average transfer speed of 650MB file = 11MB/s.