It is a great day in apple land with the announcement of the new brand new 3g iPhone, but even the new iPhone sucks in one way.
The iPhones do NOT work on 802.11n network. If you are like me, who has an all mac household and runs a 802.11n network, this is very bad news. I have an Airport Extreme Base Station 802.11n / Gigabit edition, an iMac, a Macbook Pro, a Macbook and an appleTv, all happily working on the 5 GHz, 802.11n network, until the iPhone puts a spanner in this setup.
Thankfully, I was able to work around this issue by setting up a secondary network with my existing hardware. If you are interested, read on.
- Setup your airport extreme to 802.11n only network.
- Wire one of your mac desktops using ethernet. In my case, my iMac was connected through the ethernet.
- Enable internet sharing by System Preferences – sharing – internet sharing. Choose share ethernet connection to airport. Enable WEP protection for airport sharing.
- Restart iMac. [trust me]
- Now your iPhone sees the secondary wireless network and can use that to browse.
You can also connect other legacy windows computers using this method, however, it just doesn’t work for me, windows sees the network, it connects, but it never gets an IP address. I am free of windows machines, but there is some great help here if you need it.
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1. Comment by Venky S
9/Jun/2008 at 10:53 pm
Anand,
I find this hard to believe. 11g clients can hop on to 11n networks albeit slowing the system.
This is there in the 802.11 spec. I believe there is some setting issue here.
V.
2. Comment by anand
10/Jun/2008 at 6:37 am
Venky
That is true only if you run your network at 2.4 GHz supporting both n and g. You don’t get the full performance of n at lower speeds, not to mention interference from neighborhood wi-fi networks and my other 2.4 GHz devices. Answering my 2.4 GHz landline phone kills my wi-fi network, for instance.
I see a noticeable degrade in wireless quality even when there are no 802.11g devices on the network.
I prefer running the 802.11n network on the higher channels of the 5 GHz network isolating it from other networks. One of my windows work machines supports 802.11a, so I run it on the 5 GHz network with 802.11a support and that works on the higher frequencies well.
anand