Dual speed wireless

I recently upgraded my home wireless network to 802.11n with an Apple Airport Extreme. Since the gear I have supports 802.11n, I decided to set the wireless network to 802.11n/5GHz only in order to maximize the speed.

This was all well and good, but the addition of the iPhone to my list of wireless devices (and to a lesser extent a Mac Mini) caused a problem. The problem being that I had to back the Apple Airport Extreme down to 802.11b/g/2.4GHz to allow for these new devices. Not only was I losing some speed because of this configuration change, the entire network speed would drop down from n to g speeds when the iPhone came on.

Fortunately I had an Airport Express sitting around. What I did was to set up two networks, one running off the Airport Extreme base station set to 802.11n/5GHz only, and the other one running off the Airport Express base station running at 802.11b/g/2.4GHz. The Airport Express base station is connected to the Airport Extreme base station via the wired network and is set to Bridge Mode.

So this allows me to put slower devices on the network without losing speed on the faster network.