Extending an Airport Network using WDS.
Eleanor Spenceley On the internet there appears to be lots of conflicting information regarding WDS and 802.11n, but I think there is something going on when you have a mixture of g and n devices with the dual band base station dropping the speed down to the g standard in order to extend on all devices.
However, it appears extending a network with base stations using the 802.11n standard has got a lot simpler.
(I'm using 2 Base stations one supporting 802.11n (dual band), the other has an older single band 802.11n or g setup and two 802.11g AirPort Express base stations (for printers).
My solution:
1. Stop using WDS.
2. On the (dual band) main base station, setup the Wireless network Mode with 'Create a wireless network'. I setup the base station to support 2 separate 'g' and 'n' networks.
3. On the extender base station (802.11n), setup the Wireless network mode with 'Extend a wireless network'. I chose connecting to the 'n' network.
4. On the Express base stations, I simply joined up to the 'g' network. It appears these no longer support an 'extend functionality' to the g network (unlike when WDS is used). But that's not a problem.
I've now got the distance and speed on the base station extending the network.
Hope this is useful to someone.