Airport Extreme

I’ve just treated myself to a router upgrade, I’ve just bought a new Airport Extreme. 

Unlike previous routers that I’ve had, you need to configure the Airport through the Airport Utility, which is provided with mac OS X or can be downloaded for windows, instead of via a web interface, which is the more usual approach.

Also unlike other routers, the Airport Extreme allows multiple wireless networks to be created. I effectively have three:

• Primary network on 2.5 GHz band.
• Primary network on 5 GHz band.
• Guest network.

The 2.5 and 5 GHz networks are essentially the same network, but the 5GH is only visible to devices with network adapters capable of accessing it, this includes my Macbook Pro of course, but none of the windows machines on my network.

Since 5 GHz networks are relatively rare, colisions are less frequent therefore the performance will be better. I’m seeing a visible improvement in page loading times and next to no buffering when watching BBC iPlayer.  

Some of this improvement will be the speed increase between the router and my MacBook, but as the Airport Extreme supports Gigabyte Ethernet, there’s also an improvement between the router and my cable modem and between the router and my NAS, as the NAS also supports Gigabyte ethernet.

Plugin a USB hard drive into the Airport Extreme essentially allows an ordinary USB drive to be used as a Network Drive. I’ve connected a 2TB Seagate drive which I use as a Time Machine backup drive. 

Using a network drive as a Time Machine drive is slightly slower, the first backup can take a while, but as I broke my last USB drive by picking up the Macbook, forgetting that the drive was plugged in, causing it to fall on the floor, its much safer now as it’s plugged in to the router in a cupboard under the stairs.

It should be possible to connect a USB printer to the Airport Extreme and use it as a shared printer, however not all printers are compatible (mine wasn’t).

Mac address filtering can also be set up on the Airport Extreme, as with any other router but the set up is different from what I’ve seen on other routers. The major difference is that when you set up mac filtering you must also set up the times that the device that has this mac address is allowed to connect. This could be used to prevent kids devices from connecting after their bedtime for example.

Overall I’m pretty happy with the Airport Extreme, my only gripes are that it only has three ethernet ports, most other routers have four and the issue with the printer compatibly although, that’s more an issue with the device drives from Canon than problem with the Airport Extreme.