Use Airport Express as Internet hub, bridge Time Capsule for N-only?

Question

OK I checked on the forums, but I could not find anything quite specific it what I was trying to accomplish.
I recently got a 500GB Time Capsule. I changed my network around, which was based off of two Airport Express stations – on in the office hooked up to internet & printer, one in living room hooked up to sound system – and made the TC the main hub, connecting modem to it's WAN port and bridging the office AX via LAN port in bridged mode, sharing the living room AX as WDS. This way, I had the TC in N-only mode in 5ghz spectrum using wide channels for fastest performance. All this worked well.
Except that I noticed that with the TC in the office – where the laptops rarely are – my data transfer speeds were no better than .11g speeds. So I mucked around a little, and noticed that it really was just the case that the separation of distance & obstruction was slowing the transfer speeds over .11n-only that much!
Well, it occurred to me that there may be another way. What I had intended to do was to hook up the modem back to the office AX, move the TC to the living room where it'd be "line of sight" to the laptops most of the time, and bridge the TC and living room AX over LAN. So the idea was to keep the networks separate wirelessly still, and have the internet "bridged" wirelessly from the office AX to the living room AX and then over LAN to the TC. The thinking was that the hit on the internet connection would not be noticeable as the threshold for that is well below the streaming capabilities of the AX network still, so I'd not lose anything there, but gain MUCH faster speeds with the TC in line-of-sight of the Laptops (3x as much in testing; with TC in office and laptops in living room, 1.3gb folder took 9 minutes, same folder line-of-sight testing took only 3 minutes).
However, I CANNOT get this to work properly. I thought I really just needed to move the TC to the living room and bridge it there, as the services should be shared over the LAN port since the 2.4ghz AX are in "bridged" mode, but that didn't work. I kinda-sorta got it to work by forcing both the AX network AND the TC network into "bridged mode," but that didn't seem right or wise, so I tried some other settings, putting the TC to bridged and having the office AX distribute IP addresses, but then it wouldn't show up under restart, and I'm just confused now on how to set that up!
What i need is: To have the "Office AX" hooked up to the modem & printer, on 2.4ghz since it's the older .11g model, with the "Living Room AX" on that same network. Then the TC in 5ghz N-only bridged to the Living Room AX via LAN, so it can share the services (internet & airtunes) and still get high data transfer speeds to the laptops via the advantage of Line-of-sight, non-obstructed networking.
How do I need to set this up? It's possible, right?
Message was edited by: Anthony Caltabiano

Answer 1

OK while I was working out this morning, I was trying to think of WHY my setup wasn't working. I had an epiphany, and decided to try once more. This time, it worked.
The problem was that originally I had the Living Room AX set up as a Remote, so it was hooking INTO the network, not extending it. I know that with that setup you can't hook up to THAT station and get internet or anything, you hook into the MAIN station and you can SEE the remote's services that are "plugged in" to it.
I didn't think this would be an issue with the TC physically attached to the ethernet port, but apparently this behavior extends to the ethernet port on remote stations for internet access... I had a feeling that MIGHT be it, so I started from scratch, and this time set up the Living Room AX to extend the network instead of just joining it. Then hooking up the TC to the Living Room AX's ethernet port and selecting "Bridge Mode" on the TC got me the good ol' green light!
So, if anyone out there is trying to build a dual-band network, with their TC on .11n-only and bridge to services supplied by a 2.4ghz network, AND route their internet access through the 2.4ghz network instead of the TC so that they can keep their TC more centrally located for better performance... make sure you do it like this: Set up the alternate (2.4ghz) network as relays, "extending" the network, so that when you plug into it, the TC essentially thinks it's plugged directly into the main router, no matter where it is. The throughput hit for internet access over WDS shouldn't be a problem for US-based peeps, as our speeds are typically well below the .11g threshold anyway.
I also found that it helped to NOT hide the SSID of the 2.4ghz network; doing that kept rendering failed attempts to force the secondary AX to join as WDS. Once I redid it without hiding the SSID, all went well.