Early last year I did a write-up with a bunch of tips to supercharge your Wifi performance with an Airport Extreme base station. It’s been a while and a lot has changed. Apple has released new hardware and firmwares. They also banned the use of Airport Utility 5 on recent versions of Mac OS X for some reason.
I have since experimented a bit and with all these new things found a (for me) reliable way to make Wifi fast once again.

What works for me…

Everything in this article works for me. That doesn’t necessarily mean it works for you too. My house and surroundings are different from yours. That said, the general rule of thumb is to just try and see what works best. The settings I use are all fairly generic and will apply to many people. But you may have to tweak a few things to your situation.

Basic Setup

Open up your Airport Utility from the Utilities folder in Applications. In there you’ll find your base station. Click it and click Edit.
If you press the ALT key while clicking edit you get a bit few more options but mostly information (in the form of a summary tab).

I think it’s advisable to give your base station a Static IP address. But that’s optional. If you do, make sure the IP Address is not in the DHCP range of your router (If you have one). If your Airport Extreme is the router, you must set up a static Address.

You may want to limit IPv6 to local-link only, which you can do in the Internet Options button. IPv6 isn’t really in use yet and certainly not in your home. Some internet services support it. But even then, doing without it is just fine for the next few years.

Wifi Settings

Apple simplified the Wifi settings compared to earlier versions and it seems it actually works now. So this should be fairly straight forward. They did away with most advanced settings, which is a bit of a shame. But as long as that it works that doesn’t really matter.

Create and secure your network

Obviously you want a distinct name for your wifi and not something generic like most people use. I bet half of them don’t even know which one is theirs. Look at this mess.

Madness, so set a cool name that you can identify – Like your family name or a item or character you like. Every Wifi base station in existence can change it’s wifi name, there is no excuse not to. As you can see, I still use names from the Manga Ghost in the shell.
My network is named Kusanagi. After the lead character. Setting a custom name is also useful for when you have guests over you can just tell them to connect to it without having to memorize a codename no-one can understand.

Security hasn’t changed much. WPA2 is still the best. Simple as that. Make sure all your devices support it – If they don’t, replace them.
Set up your password. Use a simple but long phrase. Something like “thisistheinternet” or whatever. It’s easy to remember yet quite long. But everyone can understand it. No need for a password like s8uf89weuwjie – You’ll get it wrong, it’s annoying and it’s nothing safer than using a phrase.

Pick your channel and radio mode carefully

Now for the fun part. Picking the right channel and radio mode. This is perhaps the most important bit and the performance of your Wifi depends on it.
I use an application called Wifi Explorer on my iMac to see what networks are available and which channel they use. The app can detect both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz networks if your device supports them.

This is what my neighborhood looks like:

2.4Ghz:

5Ghz:

Every ‘hoop’ is a Wifi Network. You’ll notice that I have pretty much the whole of 5Ghz for myself, almost everyone uses 2.4Ghz. This means that the 2.4Ghz networks are by default not at peak performance. Simply because the frequency is saturated with radio signals.

If you do not have devices that use 11b (11mbit) or 11g (54mbit) you may want to just not broadcast that. Pick the 11n (130mbit and up) option. This may increase overall speeds a bit.
We have a wireless printer in the house and for some reason it only does 11g Wifi. So I’m kinda forced to set it to a mixed radio mode.

For the channel selection refer to the above charts, if you scan your surroundings you’ll hopefully find a channel that isn’t used at all. Or has few networks on it. Pick that one. Do this for both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. Pick the least used channel. This ensures optimal speeds.

Router or not

If you have a modem/router you need to set the Airport Extreme to Bridge mode. Using NAT in the Airport too, slows you down, if things work at all.
Your modem already handles NAT, having a Double NAT is useless.

If your Airport is the router. Set it to DHCP NAT.

Conclusion

To close, not too much has changed since last year. Just the tool to set it up has changed and a few settings are gone. All of these settings, tips and things apply to any Wifi network. Regardless of your base station. I just happen to use the Apple one.

Remember, while these settings work for me, they may not, or not entirely, work for you. Fiddle around with them or skip parts where needed to get optimal performance and usability. My initial setup took me 3-4 days to get right. Endless testing and trying.

But it’s worth it.