Max speed of 802.11n only 144 Mb???

I think that Apple has only said you will get 2 1/2 or 5 times the speed of the earlier airport depending on how it is set up, you seem to be getting the 2 1/2 times. Are you using 2,4 Ghz.

The reason they aren't saying 540 mbits/s is down to it being early days for n technology.

Wish I could get 144 mbits/s out of it.

I'm afraid Apple clearly stated wha you would get out of this unit, many of us are having issues getting that but assume we are using the wrong settings or something. I don't think you can complain too much when it does exactly what it says on the box.

I think I can complain *a lot* when a box says
"802.11n" and fails to meet this. If you need help
understanding this, go look up when the speed of
802.11n says it should be.

You're confused. You're getting the maximum bandwidth using 2.4ghz. Change the AEBS to 5ghz 'n' only mode and, assuming you are close enough and there are no sources of interference nearby, you'll get higher bandwidth.

The downside to higher bandwidth, however, is shorter range. It's a tradeoff. In my house I've still got one 'b' device (an old iBook that can't be upgraded), four 'g' devices and one 'n' device. In this mixed network I still get 144 mbps all over the house (more than twice as fast as 'g') for my 'n' device, the 'g' devices all get 54 mpbs and the lowly 'b' device gets it's 11 mbps or whatever. All in all, pretty good performance. Oh yeah, since it uses 2.4ghz, range is great.

And it meets the draft standards in place at this time.

http://www.apple.com/wireless/80211/

NONE of the draft routers are getting 540mbit, it is a DRAFT and is not finalized, the 540mbits is theoretical, and perhaps might be seen with the ratified version. The 144mbit is not the max for this router however, it will run at 300mbit/s if you switch out of mixed mode and do N-only 5ghz. Of course the performance difference there is really moot except for BETWEEN N clients because the wired is 100mbit, and the AirDisk stuff is turning out around 30mbits.

Check out this review for a bunch of N routers, they're topping out below 50mbit throughput, also note how the G routers (WRT54GS) do NOT pull a full 54mbit.

http://reviews.cnet.com/BelkinWireless_Pre_N_router/4505-33197-30993672.html#more

It is an N router, it uses the draft N which utilizes a MIMO approach, which is rather different from previous technologies, so... you are getting what you paid for, and Apple has not misrepresented the product.

That said, I really wish AirDisk had better throughput, but they didn't quote any benchmarks on that, so I can complain, but there wasn't any false advertising.

You might want to read up on the OSI model so that you understand the difference between raw data rates (the rate that the actual radios communicate) and the rates at lower layers where your application is sending and receiving data. You would then understand that the layers between the PHY and the Application layers inject all sorts of extra payload data.

So, in answer to your questions the number you quoted is the maximum PHY rate, not the maximum application level data rate.

How do I tell if it's using N, G or smoke signals? And how to I tell how fast it is? The signal strength seems pegged, but how does one find out other info?

Applications -> Utilities -> Network Utility will tell you what the link speed is between your computer's network connections and the remote switches/access points. I would say it's safe to assume that 11Mbps is 802.11b, 54Mbps is 802.11g, and 144Mbps is 802.11n - all running at 2.4Ghz. I've got my Airport Extreme setup for 5Ghz fixed-N networking and the link speed claims to be 300Mbps. This is theoretical - in reality it will probably max out between 35-70Mbps.

My network utility describes the connection as 270Mb/s.
Air Traffic control widget (which shows what the fluctuating speed is internally) varies but seems to max-out at 216Mb/s.

However measuring actual throughput is the only thing that really matters.
The fastest I have been able to shift data is 8Megabytes per second. But I suspect the limiting factor is the 100Megabit ethernet port.

Glyn