Last October, Apple updated its Airport Extreme and Time capsule models to further improve performance. We have been testing both products and we could confirm the faster data transfer speed in optima conditions. However, it seems that many users are having problems with the 5 GHz network as reported on Apple forum: New Extreme (slow on 5 Ghz but NOT on 2.4Ghz?!?!?). If you remain very close to the station, performances are excellent, but they dramatically dropped as soon as you slightly move away from the station. We also experienced another problem, while the effective range has increased, the reliability of hate network dropped, usually connection is broken when the wireless link is heavily used. So in summary, if you remain close enough to the station, everything is fine, as soon as you move away, performance and reliability drop. So, we rely on Apple to provide an updated firmware for both devices in order to finally get long range performance and reliability as advertised for both models.
there is apparently another major issue affecting some Airport cards found in Mac mini and MacBook models after migrating to Snow Leopard as reported by one of our reader below as well as on Apple forum:
My son basically cannot get a reliable connection with a two and half year old white Macbook since installing SL. The Airport update did not fix anything. If you want to get a feeling of the detailed situation of many people (33 pages, 47000 readers!) look at:http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2142725&tstart=0. I can assure it, it's hell when you cannot use wifi on a laptop. Beyond home, where he can get close enough to the router, my son can no longer use the mac in the library where he studies.
Here too, let's hope that Apple could identify the problem affecting apparently the Airport card found in those computer models when they are running Snow Leopard, it sounds like an obvious issue with Airport driver in SL.
