802.11n Manuals and Software Revealed
Apple has made the manuals available for its brand new 802.11n wireless base station. Posted to Apple's website is "Airport Extreme (802.11n) Setup Guide" (500KB PDF) and a guide named "Designing AirPort Extreme 802.11n Networks" (1.8MB PDF).
Images of the AirPort Utility that will be included with the AirPort Extreme base station have also been made available online. (Images below)
AirPort Extreme Update
Yesterday Apple released an update aimed at Intel-based Macs. The update is available to download from Apple's website (6.5MB)
Apple summarises the update as follows:
This update is recommended for all Intel-based Macintosh computers and provides compatibility with AirPort Extreme base stations and networks.
A more detailed description of the update is as follows:
An out-of-bounds memory read may occur while handling wireless frames. An attacker in local proximity may be able to trigger a system crash by sending a maliciously-crafted frame to an affected system. This issue affects the Core Duo version of Mac mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro computers equipped with wireless. Other systems, including the Core 2 Duo versions are not affected. This update addresses the issue by performing additional validation of wireless frames. Credit to LMH for reporting this issue.
AirPort Extreme Limits in UK
Users of the new AirPort Extreme base station will be disadvantaged if they live in the UK, Japan, Austria, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Slovakia, and Spain.
Apple's choice to use both the 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz bandwidth for the new router has interfered with laws and rulings in the listed countries. On Apple's US website the speed gains are advertised as being 5x faster than 802.11g as opposed to 2.5x on Apple's UK website.
By making use of both the 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz frequencies allows the new wireless base station to support the complete 802.11 spectrum; a, b, g and n. The 5.0GHz frequency is considerably less prone to interference than the lower 2.4GHz frequency.
Unfortunately making use of the 5.0GHz frequency is banned in the UK, Japan, Austria, Estonia, Germany, Latvia, Slovakia, and Spain. This is due to restrictions that prohibit the use of the wide-channel frequencies. The wide-channel operation that is restricted is the 40MHz channel that is found in the 5GHz frequency.
A source explained to Macworld UK that "The 802.11n standard offers a bandwidth frequency that determines how much speed you will be able to achieve. This is either 20MHz or 40MHz, with 20MHz being 2.5x faster than 11g and 40MHz being 5x faster than 11g. I suspect that in the UK Apple's device is only able to use 20MHz because it is illegal to use the 40MHz bandwidth when using the frequency of 5GHz."
"Most venders haven't adopted this frequency so they can use 40MHz and hence get the full 5x 11g speed," explained Macworld’s source.
AirPort Utility
Some images of the new AirPort Admin Utility, screenshots taken from Apple's PDF manual.
