If we put the router in a quiet room, put our ear right up to the bottom and listen carefully, we can hear a very faint hum from the fan.

We’ve seen two 802.11ac AirPort Extreme routers in our office (the first one was faulty, but for reasons unrelated to the fan), and neither was loud, or even noticeably audible under any reasonable condition. We think these experiences may be due to faulty routers. We’ve seen comments here and elsewhere that indicate that some AirPort Extreme owners find the new router to be loud, presumably from the fan. The other routers in our test bench rely on traditional passive cooling, so we wanted to compare the efficacy of these different approaches for this new generation of networking products.įirst, let’s look at noise. Location 1: The same room as the routers, on a wooden table approximately ten feet away.Īpple sought to rectify this with the addition of a fan and plenty of intake and venting locations. These are the same five locations from our initial look at the AirPort Extreme, and we’ll repeat their descriptions here for those who missed the first article: We tested each router independently, with all other wireless devices disabled during the tests, and measured the bandwidth from five locations. Therefore, for situations in which a router must “go the distance” in terms of signal strength, we’re looking for better range, even at the expense of speed compared to 802.11ac. 802.11ac may be significantly faster than its predecessor, but it’s stuck in the higher 5GHz frequency, which does not have the range of the more crowded 2.4GHz frequency.

We’re interested in two key areas with these tests: 5GHz 802.11ac performance and 2.4GHz 802.11n performance. Results were then averaged to provide a good long-term look at performance. Due to inevitable variations in the connection between the devices, the tests were run 10 times for each protocol with each router at each location. TCP connections over the course of 30 seconds were then measured in megabits per second between the computers (please note the difference between mega bits and mega bytes 8 megabits equals 1 megabyte). The iMac was configured as the server and the MacBook Air as the client. We therefore performed straight bandwidth tests using JPerf, a GUI framework for the excellent Iperf network monitoring and testing utility.

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