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AirPort Extreme setup in bridge mode

Hello everyone. I’ve hooked up an ancient 2nd gen AirPort Extreme I had in a drawer to a Nokia G240 WC modem/router that won’t work as a modem only, so I’ ve set the AE up as an access point in bridge mode. This is working as far as it goes but I have two problems. The first is that the AE only works connected to the Nokia via one of its Ethernet ports. I can’t get it to work connected to its WAN port. The second problem is speed. Compared with wired connections to the Extreme, which are fast, wireless connections are dog slow. Not sure if the two problems are related or whether I’m just expecting too much from the old thing (it has up to 10 wireless connections at any one time). Wireless function on the Nokia is switched off. I don’t understand why I can’t connect the Nokia to the AE’s WAN port!

Posted on Aug 5, 2021 1:18 PM

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18 replies

Aug 7, 2021 7:44 PM in response to David Miller7

Your 5ghz is using channel 100 (DFS channel) but only 40mhz of bandwidth.. You need 80mhz to do full AC wireless.

Part of the issue is EU restrictions on 5ghz.. it is difficult to find 80 contiguous bandwidth.

The wiki article on WLAN is very helpful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_WLAN_channels

It has a great chart for 5ghz with the channels available in each country/region.

Believe nothing you read about those stupid speeds attainable on 2.4ghz.. Apple deliberately restrict their clients to 20mhz .. so you see your 2.4ghz is using channel 5 and link speed is 145Mbps.. once you convert this to real world speed you will be lucky to achieve 70Mbps total across all clients with none achieving more than around 50Mbps. It is just the nature of wifi.

Aug 8, 2021 2:00 AM in response to LaPastenague

Thanks for the update! Yes, WiFi standards and regulations are a bit chaotic and our expectations of it perhaps more so! Anyway, I learned a lot from this discussion, so once again, many thanks for your input!

Aug 6, 2021 1:37 AM in response to David Miller7

Just changed the static address to 192.168.1.2 as there was a conflict with another device on the old address, but no change to the sluggish wireless speeds.

AirPort Extreme setup in bridge mode