You will remember that wide channels are the method by which you can boost the throughput of your Airport Extreme access point to up to 300Mbps, if your local laws allow it. It used to be set by, in Airport Utility, going into the wireless options, choosing a country that supports it and ticking the “Use wide channels” box.

This functionality may have been recently removed, however. While testing network connectivity today using our favourite wLAN graphing software, AP Grapher, we noticed that our maximum bandwidth was 130Mbps. Yet we still had wide channels selected. We’re unable to find a way of getting 300Mbps right now, using the current 7.3.2 Airport Extreme firmware.

Can anyone else confirm they’re having the same issue, or is it unique to us?

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Airport Extreme, wide channels

Posted: July 16th, 2008 under News.
Comments: none

I’ve been using the iPhone properly now for 72 hours, and the my first impressions have set in. And while there is a lot of good about the phone, there are definite imperfections. Here are the top three:

It’s slow. Actions that took an imperceptible time before, such as selecting somewhere else in the Contacts list, or going to the SMS screen, now have a perceptible delay. This is going to irritate me more and more.

It’s buggy. I’ve had the location services freeze, requiring me to reboot the phone to get it working. I never needed to reboot my last one.

Battery life is terrible When out and about in the city centre last night, with moderate iPhone use over both Wifi and 3G, the battery got down to 20% from a full charge over five hours. That’s really not good.

For the moment, applications and flexibility are winning out – I do still like it. However my opinions may have changed after a few months’ use.

Posted: July 14th, 2008 under Review.
Comments: 1

Getting there eventually is not an experience I usually associate with Apple. Famously, their stuff Just Works. The launch of the iPhone 3G in the UK has been a clear and frustrating exception this week. OK, demand peaks like this are always terrible things to manage, but did Apple compound the issue by trying to do too much at once?

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Posted: July 13th, 2008 under Comment.
Comments: none