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How do you get a new 802.11ac Airport Extreme to use 80 MHz wide channels on the 5 GHz band?
Mine stays at 20 MHz, thus restricting my max rate to 217 Mbps rather than the expected 1300 Mbps.
Do you still need to support 802.11n clients? If so, I would suggest that you give the 5 GHz network a separate network name and only connect 802.11ac clients to this network.
Thanks for the reply. I did try giving the 5 GHz network a unique name, and only connected a 2013 MacBook Pro to the 5 GHz ac network. But that gave the same results. Only 20 MHz channel width, and a maximum supported rate of 217 Mbps.
With a bit more tinkering I think I found the "problem". While setting up the new 802.11ac Airport, I let the setup software copy the configuration from the 5th Gen Airport that it was replacing. As a result, it configured itself to only use 20MHz channels for the 5 GHz network.
I reset the Airport to the default setup, with no other Airport to copy, it let me set all the config options maunally, and now uses 80 MHz wide channels for the 5 GHz network - giving me a max rate of 1300 Mbps.
The lesson here is - don't let the setup software copy an existing configuration if you want to take advantage of the new features. Seems like a bug in the setup software to me.
How do you get an 802.11ac Airport Extreme to use wide channels?
