My recent issue with my laptop forced me to try Time Machine over a wireless network to the Airport Extreme N.
This has been working fine, but I wanted to see if I could eek out even better performance.
Thus, I dedicated the Airport Extreme N to a 5ghz N only network. I then set up my older Linksys WRT54G in bridge mode to serve the 802.11b and 802.11g clients.
So far, the results have been fantastic. I don’t have hard numbers, but streaming movies to Apple TV is near instant now. Backing up to Time Machine seems to be doing 10-12MB/second, based on watching the menu.
Small transfers still seem to suffer, but this is not much different than with a local drive filesystem. Large files always have much more throughput than a lot of little files.
Screen Sharing is screaming fast now, with live dragging showing almost no artifacts.
So if you have an Airport Extreme N and are still using older wifi devices (TiVo, PS3, Wii, older computers), consider breaking out an older router and using it as a wireless access point (WAP) and dedicate that fancy router to those clients who can really use it.
I’ve thought about doing this, especially since my Nintedo DS Lite doesn’t like to work with anything other than WEP.