Airport Extreme and 5.8gzh phones

I'm getting ready to plug in an Airport Extreme and I'm not sure if I should select 2.4 ghz or 5.8ghz (does it give me a choice?). I have 5.8ghz Uniden portable phones. I've been using a linksys wireless-g router and currently get good speeds with it, but it's a bit flakely lately and getting a bit long in the tooth, so I want to replace it with the wireless-n AE.

I understand 5.8 ghz would help with throughput (correct?) but not sure if my phones (which I don't use that often - do they have to be in use or just plugged in to cause issues?) would cause issues.

Thanks for your thoughts,
Mark

On the newer MacBook Pros and the newest AEBS transmit rate can be up to 450 I see 400. The iPhone will see N but only in 2.4GHz and thats the beauty part of the new Extreme it has simultaneous radios so while your Mac can use 5GHz your phone
can get 2.4GHz at the same time. You will just have to experiment or you can do like
I did and get a DECT 6.0 cordless set that operates in no one else's band.

The truth is - you won't know until you try. EM waves are crazy little things and a full discussion of what could possibly happen would take pages - when in reality - the best thing to do is just check it out. I have a feeling you won't see any real degrade in performance but it's certainly possible. Do a few tests with speedtest.net and then turn the phone off and repeat the same number of tests - and draw your conclusion. There are people who get paid a lot of money to write some very complicated software to model EM environments - and even then - it's just a better educated guess. Don't forget - there's no shortage of things operating in the 2.4GHz bands.