Why doesn’t iPhone 3G support WiFi N?
I’m disappointed that Apple’s support of 802.11n – the latest, but still draft, incarnation of the wireless Ethernet specs — extends to its Macs and Airport access points, but not to its handhelds.
In my office, all of the desktop/notebook computers that access the network via WiFi are capable of 802.11n. They access it via our current-generation Airport Extreme base station, as well as the new Airport Express wireless hub that extends the signal and operates as a remote iTunes speaker driver.
You’d think, therefore, that we could take advantage of all the 802.11n capabilities that the Airports and Macs have to offer. By switching to run in 802.11n-only mode (instead of the 802.11b/g/n compatibility mode), we could improve throughput and overall wireless performance. We could also shift out entire network to the 5GHz radio band, instead of the crowded 2.4GHz band used by 802.11b/g. (802.11n can work on either band.)
But alas, we can’t make our wireless LAN 802.11n-only. Why? Because our iPhone and iPod touch users wouldn’t be able to be on the network. Those devices, you see, are 802.11b/g-only.
One would think, Apple would remedy that with its forthcoming iPhone 3G. One would think that this device would be 802.11n-capable. One would be wrong. According to Apple, the new iPhone 3G will still be an 802.11b/g device. Slower. Shorter range. Locked into the 2.4GHz radio band.
Thanks, Apple. Not!
Seriously, folks, what you should be doing, if you have a lot of 802.11n devices, and just a few “legacy” 802.11b/g devices, is set up TWO parallel wireless networks. That’s what we’re going to do, one of these days.
Set up the first one to be 802.11n only, and put it onto the 5GHz band. Put the other network onto 802.11b/g band. By letting the WiFi N-capable devices zoom ahead in their own express lane, both networks — and therefore, overall throughput for your users — will be faster and better.
Thanks for an elegantly simple solution for an annoyance that has been bugging me for months.
I love my 802.11n Airport Extreeme and MBP with wireless speeds that are the same as wired ethernet, but my Iphone was left out in the cold without “n” support.
Why didn’t I think of that?
MK
The situation is actually much worse than this. The 3g phone has screwed up wifi vs the 2g phone. You will get very poor performance over anything but 802.11b ONLY on long fat pipes.
The change is instantaneous: if I switch my airport to 802.11b ONLY (not b/g or a or n) then the 3g iphone performs at the same speed as the 2g iphone. If I turn it back to any other setting the 3g iphone falls flat .. high latency connections such as youtube from outside the USA cause wifi to crawl and youtube is unusable.
So the solution to 3g iphone users with mysteriously poor wifi performance on their phone is to change their home AP to 802.11b (11mbit, 2.4ghz) _only_! then you get the same performance as 2g users got.
Thanks for the post. I do the same with the parallel networks. I wish I had found this before I spent days battling with this problem.
I have an Airport Express, Extreme, the 3G iphone and a macbook pro.
It would be nice if the next iteration of the iPhone was up to date with the wifi technology.
Having said all that I still love all my apple products.
Thanks again for your post.
Cheers.
Good news, with the new release of the Airport Extreme and Time Capsule Dual-Band Networking has been added.
The new Airport Extreme offers the ability to run separate wireless networks on both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz band at the same time.