2 Airport Extremes, 1 slower than the other

hiimchris3 wrote:

Ruling out placement, what specifically about the older model do you suspect is limiting the output?

Let me give a number of reasons:

1. The 1G Airport Extreme came out in 2007. That would make it, at least 14 years old. Typical consumer-grade networking hardware has a useful lifespan of 3-5 years. The fact that yours lasted this long is simply amazing.
2. The 1G Extreme was notorious for failing power supplies.
3. The 1G Extreme can only broadcast a Wi-Fi network on either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band. Not both simultaneously. Most likely it is only extending the 2.4 GHz radio's signal from the 5G station.
4. The 1G Extreme only has 100 Mbps Ethernet ports.
5. Apple abandoned the networking hardware business in early 2018. Finding "new" base stations will become more difficult over time.
6. As mentioned before, when extending a AirPort base station, with another, the resultant wireless network will lose as much as half its total bandwidth. There is no way to avoid this. Also, the extending station can only repeat the wireless signal at the bandwidth that it receives. The latter point was covered in the user tip.
7. Etc.

Would I have to buy another gen 5 airport extreme

That would only be somewhat beneficial if the connection between them can be wired. This is because the 5G Extreme has 1 Gbps Ethernet ports. One option would be to consider using Powerline Adapters. These take advantage of your home's electrical circuit to create a pseudo Ethernet one between them. Basically, you would add an adapter near both base stations. This would achieve having an "Ethernet" connection between them without having to run actual Ethernet cable.

or would another router with a certain specification suffice?

If you intend to use this other router, instead of the 1G Extreme, but keep the connection between them wireless, this won't work unfortunately. That is because Apple uses a propriety extending method with their base stations.

Two things are going "against" you here:

1. The age & limitations of the 1st generation AirPort Extreme, and
2. The connection between them being wireless.

To realize any "speed" improvements, assuming that you don't want to replace either AirPort, would be to connect the 1G Extreme back to the 5G Extreme by Ethernet. Basically, you lose around half of the available bandwidth with a wireless extended connection. Is this something that is doable for you? If not, one potential option would be to see if you can improve the bandwidth by better base station placement of the extending base station (in this case, your 1G Extreme.) The following user tip article goes over that:

Ref: AirPort - Optimal Base Station Placement - Apple Community

Reliability is just not particularly good.

I used a pair of Gen5 AE to solve a situation almost identical to yours.

I didn't have ethernet running to an area of the house.. but did to room below it.. so I setup a pair of AE which were all of 6' apart through floor / ceiling of timber and plasterboard. I could get full speed ie 450mbps on the link by using 5ghz band.

In the end I found 2 issues.. latency.. attempting to use any sort of direct communication like phone call using what's app between phone upstairs to someone outside.. would be unusable.. unfortunately double wireless links are always much worse than theory suggests.

It was fine for just data link.. but not interactive link where latency becomes a problem.

And about once or twice a week it would stop working altogether.. and so would need reboot of both AE.

It took me a while to realise the problem was the pair of AE.. so we lived with it.. better than nothing.. but once it became obvious what's app issue was entirely the fault of the link.. ethernet solved it.

If you own the house get a quote for proper ethernet cabling to be installed. You will not regret spending the money as more and more internet communication is now the norm.

Wireless mesh products are better designed and particularly tri-band which have a separate wireless channel for backhaul between the stations. But they can never beat ethernet cabling. In a situation where you rent though spending the money for decent grade mesh will hugely improve wifi throughout the house.