Why in the UK do I only get 2.5x the speed with the new 802.11n Airport Extreme Base Station, whilst everyone else gets 5x the speed?
802.11n Airport Extreme Base Station
Apple have released a new Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS)
The major differences and improvements are:
- Support for 802.11a and 802.11n as well as 802.11b and 802.11g
- Three LAN ports over the original's single LAN port.
- Abilty to connect a USB 2 hard drive to the USB port.
- Ability to connect multiple hard drives and printers to the USB port
In the UK we will only get a 2.5x advantage when using the new 802.11n Airport Extreme compared to the 5x advantage that virtually everyone else will get.
In order to get the 5x speed you need to be using wide-channel operation.
The following countries do not allow wide-channel operation: Austria, Estonia, Germany, Japan, Latvia, Slovakia, Spain and the United Kingdom.
Which means you only get the 2.5x advantage over 802.11g when using 802.11n - of course this is only between 802.11n devices.