Well, I had all but given up on my Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) when I stumbled upon this fix deep within the apple forums. Apparently if you change an advance setting for IPv6 and set it to “Local-link only” and it will get back to regular speeds and stability… for about 5 minutes.

You can read through the aforementioned forum thread for a while if you want, but the short of it is - the AEBS 802.11n, gigabit or non-gigabit is a total dud.  There are scattered reports of it actually working well but I have read way too many of these horror stories to recommend this thing to anyone.  The thing I don’t understand is what planet the reviewers were on when they said this thing was blazing fast, etc.  I have only found one article on a company sponsored blog that discussed any problems - and that blog said he turned it off for a day and that fixed his problem…  My theory is that the non-gigabit version with the 7.1.1 software worked pretty decent.  Problem is that I have the gigabit version and it only works with 7.2 and higher.  Even if the 7.1.1 firmware works great, that is really not acceptable since many security and 802.11n improvements were supposed to be in subsequent firmware updates.

Regardless - I have been trying to get this thing working in 802.11n (5ghz) mode for a while and just cannot get a stable connection to my MacBook Pro even with it 5 feet away.  It is about 1/10th the speed of the router it replaced and drops out all the time (even though that router was 50 feet away on 2.4ghz 802.11n).

If you want a great 802.11n router go for the D-Link DIR-655.  I have had one for about 6 months and it is great.  I bricked it once while messing with firmware updates and had to have it replaced (thus the AEBS purchase in the interim) but despite that minor snafu the DIR-655 has worked great especially with the latest 1.10 firmware.

Until Apple comes up with some better firmware (better than 7.2.1 at least) I will be using the AEBS as a $179 3 port gigabit router…