802.11n is NOT YET A STANDARD. So, it's not at all surprising that communication between devices from two different manufacturers may not communicate that great.

According to you then, there is no point for a review of a router. If you are only going to do a closed ecosystem for networking the decision of which router to use is already determined by what networking hardware you have in your computer. Compared to other 802.11n routers, this fell short in both speed and range. It doesn't matter if the draft is not been made a standard yet, they are all writing off the same specification. Standard and draft are just statuses of the specification. The problem is not that you cannot implement to the specification, it is that the specification might change before it becomes a standard and then if those changes are material then devices written to the draft specification may no longer work. The draft status of the specification doesn't make it harder to write to a specification, only riskier.

When PCI 1.0 became a standard, there were areas where two manufacturers could implement a card and a slot that were both compliant with the standard yet could not talk to each other due to timing issues. The timing issues arose due to differing interpretations of the specification.

It wasn't until PCI 1.1 was finalized was the standard tightened up and you could be assured that two compliant devices could actually work together.

The same might also be true with regards to 802.11n. The status of draft vs. standard is important if the wording of the specification is ambiguous.

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Windows/PC users demanding ultimate network performance should look elsewhere

Yes, Windows users should look elsewhere. And when they do, they'll find nothing else comparable or as good a value.

(BTW, how did that Netgear RangeMax router do on the 5 GHz band?)

Be interesting to confirm if indeed you lose the router functionality if the internal HD fails.

It's still a 'not quite' product for me - for instance, while I can appreciate why Apple pulled Time Machine support for USB external disks mounted on the Airport Express, I'd still like to be able to plug in an external HD to a time capsule and automatically backup my backup.

Also, there are other NAS solutions that can act as iTunes servers. With an AppleTV that would be the best solution.

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Guest wrote:
Be interesting to confirm if indeed you lose the router functionality if the internal HD fails.

It was confirmed by Apple itself. If you read the full review you'll find that they wrote, "One thing we feared about the Time Capsule when we first heard of it is that because it's essentially a closed box, if the hard drive or the router fails, you end up losing both. It's been shown that you can peel off the Time Capsule's rubbery bottom and remove the hard drive yourself, but Apple confirmed for us that even if you were to do that, you couldn't treat the Time Capsule as a standalone router, as the hard drive hosts vital data on it for the networking functionality as well."

It's weird that they won't let it work with iTunes or Apple TV. I could spend less and get a faster router with a usb port and plug a hard drive into it and end up with more functionality and better performance. This device seems kind of gimmicky to me.