Read to the end of the article, folks.<p>This is what happened: he tweaked settings galore, hoping to squeeze out more performance somehow. Nerds tend to do this; it's natural.<p>However by removing the automatic settings and forcing it into one or more configurations that may have been suboptimal, performance actually decreased.<p>When he returned the settings to "fully automatic" everything was fine and dandy and maximal.<p>Moral of the story (and I quote): "Resist the urge to tinker with these settings."<p>You can basically ignore everything except that last line—and if you're familiar with the excellent AirPort Extreme, you probably already knew that.
I don't get this behaviour with my (latest-gen) Airport Extreme. I have a separate 5GHz network and get consistently 360Mbps to 450Mbps connection to it. Are you sure your Airport isn't faulty?<p>Changing it to a single name for both networks leaves my iMac always connected via 2.4GHz and no obvious way to switch to 5GHz.
I'd like to know a little more about the network setup. Are the Expresses bridging via Ethernet, or acting as repeaters? I don't know if that could be part of what he's seeing, but I'm still interested.
When it comes to any mass-market consumer product, 99% of the users (I'm exaggerating, no, probably not) will leave all settings at the default. Therefore the default settings have orders of magnitude more real-world testing than all non-default setting combinations COMBINED. Nearly any mature product is therefore bound to behave dramatically better on its default settings than in any other configuration in sheer defiance of what "should" happen.