This post was originally planned as a rant about how Apple’s AirPort Extreme base station with 802.11n draft capability still hangs and drops all NAT port mappings after about 24 hours of use (see my previous post). I was going to call it names. However, it turned out differently, read on for some interesting observations...

The NAT breakdown is more than a minor annoyance for me because my web server runs behind this router. If the problem occurs and I don't immediately notice it and restart the base station using AirPort Utility, the web site is not accessible and my mail doesn’t work.

It was very annoying but I didn’t do anything about it because I thought that Apple would fix this pretty quickly. Unfortunately I was wrong and after the last two firmware updates it’s still broken. I also sent it in for repair and got a replacement unit (still the fast ethernet version though, not the new August 2007 version with Gigabit ethernet). It has the same problem so I guess it really is a firmware issue.

To stabilize the web site situation, I finally bought a different wireless router. Since I was really hooked on the higher 802.11n draft throughput, I again bought one with this feature, the WNR854T from NetGear. After playing around with it for an evening, I think I know what a real POS is.

I could not believe how many technical features I knew from the Apple product were completely missing, and how awkward the web based administration used by NetGear and many other vendors still is. I realized how incredibly good the setup and configuration experience of Apple’s AirPort Utility is (the new one, not the old one for the old round Extremes). Here are just a few examples on the administration side:

• Every single port mapping requires a restart?!? I have lots of port mappings, and each restart takes almost a minute. Seriously, WTF??? I want to configure them all, then commit them together.
• The logging is a joke. No syslog, and the only events it reports are when someone hits the content filter? I am interested in a lot more information, like the Apple base station provides.
• Port mappings seem to be possible only on the same port. I can’t map the incoming port x to the port y on the internal machine. I have two hosts I need to reach with SSH from outside, how am I supposed to do that when only one mapping for port 22 is possible? The Apple base station allows me to configure two different ports on the WAN side.

(And the web interface is ugly! You’d think they could hire a web designer to freshen it up a bit.)

The NetGear product is also technically inferior. Examples:

• No 5GHz Band??? I could not believe this, and I could not believe I didn't check this before buying it.
• No USB port for attaching printers or harddisks. I don’t care about the disks, but I do use a printer.
• It’s slooooooooow! I compared throughput before and after the switch, see below...

After setting everything up, I was in for a surprise: The wireless network throughput sucked badly. Here is a measurement from before the switch:

Average Dload Speed is the interesting number. Four megabytes per second which feels fairly snappy.

I didn’t touch the computer, and the router was in the same location as the AirPort Extreme before it. The download speed is almost 10 times lower!

I played around with some of the settings, but that didn’t help. The AirPort Extreme was operating in the 5 GHz band and the NetGear can only use the 2.4GHz band, which is pretty full in my neighborhood so that might explain some of the difference. However, when I first set up the AirPort Extreme, I also tried it in the 2.4GHz band and it was much faster even there.

To be fair, 802.11n is not yet a final standard and things could (and hopefully will) improve, especially in the area of interoperability between equipment of different vendors, like the NetGear base station and an Apple laptop in this case.

Because this throughput was not acceptable, but going back was not an option either, I ended up using both devices: I completely switched off the NetGear’s wireless system and use it strictly as an (expensive) NAT router. On the AirPort Extreme, I switched off all routing features, it is now a simple wireless-to-ethernet bridge. When I measured the throughput again, I was in for another big surprise, this time a nice one: The download speed almost doubled!

It seems that the Apple base station performs much better when NAT/DHCP is deactivated. It’s a bit strange because the connection to the peer host does not even involve NAT, it is connected to one of the router’s LAN ethernet port.

Either the Extreme’s processor is under-powered or its firmware is really in a bad shape.

All this made me realize that Apple does make the perfect wireless network equipment for home use. The whole experience, provided on one hand by technical features like USB and digital audio ports (on the Express) and by their administration software on the other hand is great. It’s funny that Apple’s product is the one providing far far more technical options. They are usually the ones being accused of dumbing down the user interface and limiting options, but in this case there are way more options and features, enabling me to handle even complicated and unusual network configurations (especially regarding NAT/WDS/DHCP/port mapping).

Now if they could please fix the hangs and crashes in their firmware!