Any hands-on experience with the Airport Extreme?
I need some advice. Tomorrow, after weeks of wrestling with Berlin's ISPs, I'm finally getting DSL installed at my new flat, which means I can finally move in. I'm only missing one thing: a router. And though my better judgment is telling me otherwise, I'm leaning towards an Apple Airport Extreme.
Does anyone have any hands-on thoughts on the Extreme? I admit, a prime motivation is simply superficial: I have a MacBook Pro and two Airport Expresses and there's sort of a purity in completing the fusion with the Extreme. The ability to plug a USB hard drive into the Extreme and use it as a NAS is also compelling: I would really like to divorce my iTunes collection from my laptop, especially since I'll likely put together an HTPC soon.
Even so, I have no actual experience with an Airport Extreme... and I've tended to gravitate towards DD-WRT capable Linksys cheapies in the past. Any BBG readers have an Extreme? What do you think of it? Would you recommend it?
the latest
latest episodes
I've got, um, several, actually ;). I like them quite a bit. But we're a Mac house, so that matters. It'll almost certainly work right out of the box, although you will want to change the name and passwords.
Using an Airport Extreme as a NAS box is risky, however, for several reasons. The biggest one is that there is essentially no USB disk adapter out there that honours the "flush track cache" command. What this means is that the data are not reliably flushed to disk, and any problem, such as a power failure or network interruption, can then result in a corrupt filesystem. (And since 802.11[bg] works near to microwave oven frequencies, it gets interrupted a lot! This is why I do NOT recommend using an AE with Time Machine; the Time Capsule has a later firmware, and the built-in drive does honour the FTC command. Also note that there's been a recent firmware update for the AE; I don't know if it got it up to the TC version. But that won't fix the USB adapter problem, which makes it still risky.)
I went wireless about a year ago - bought an Airport Extreme to network a (visiting) Dell laptop running Vista, an older IBM Thinkpad running XP and an eMac with an original airport card. It was a bit futzy getting it set up to work with all three machines, but I managed do it -- even though I have zero understanding of the various esoteric protocols and the dark wireless arts. Recently added a MacBook to the mix (I initially had some signal dropping with this, but it was particular to this machine and seems to have been largely corrected by recent software updates)as well as an Airport Express used to network a printer. Again, a bit futzy to set up the Airport Express, but managed to get it working properly in short order. After the initial setup, I've had zero problems -- consistently strong signals and fast speeds. Hope this is helpful.
I have been using mone for about a year now, and like it quite a bit. I do own mostly Apple gear, but I am also pretty skeptical about Apple's infallibility, and this one passes muster.
One warning... an attached hard drive works much more smoothly under 10.5 than it did under 10.4. If you are running 10.5, everything should work very smoothly. I was able to get access to the disk from Windows and Ubuntu as well, but under Windows it was more of a pain, and involved installing software from the CD to each computer you wanted to give access to.
As for the Wi-Fi itself... works very well, has a great configuration utility with lots of options, and gets great reception. I used it through 12" thick conrete walls and 100 yards of other people's apartments, both with no problem. It's nice getting great reception from anywhere on your property!
We use an Apple Airport Express and I swear by it, I can only imagine the extreme would be better. We gave up on Linksys routers 2 years ago after having three fail in 4 months.
I've had an Airport Extreme for over a year and have had ZERO problems with it. I have a usb hub with a printer and use it for Time Machine (against my better judgment - see first comment) and a giant iTunes library on an external drive. Again no problems. I've had two other wireless routers (d-link and linksys) and this one has by far been the fastest and most stable with less dropped packets (don't know if that is just due to using N only as opposed to mixed-mode). Port forwarding is easy to set up and the windows machines in the house have no trouble with it. One thing I did notice is that the bugger gets a little hot. I just set it up on two small blocks of wood to get some airflow underneath and it feels much cooler to the touch.
In the past I've generally gotten standard Linksys wireless routers, but recently I went for the Airport Extreme, mostly because I wanted to attach a NAS drive.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the design of it though, it lives up to the Apple reputation. There's only one light on the front, and it's generally pretty accurate: green if everything is fine, orange if something is wrong. If there is a problem, it often pops up a message on one of your machines with a very legible message about what's wrong, and even a picture on how it should probably be fixed.
A few features you don't hear about much:
* You can set different passwords for getting onto the network and for accessing each individual drive. I like to keep my network open, but I don't want to share my data so promiscuously.
* You can do wireless time machine backups to the attached drive. It's not advertised, nor explicitly supported, but it works.
* The UI makes it appear like you could attach multiple drives, I suppose through a USB hub. Note: I haven't tried this.
* IPv6, by default, out of the box. This works whether or not your ISP explicitly supports IPv6. I mean, it's gotta be the future sometime.
So, yeah. I'd recommend it.
I've had an Airport Extreme for several months now and it has been working like a dream. Wireless-N all the way.
I previously an SMC router which worked well enough for several years. But ever since I upgraded my security key to WPA, it was always glitchy and dropping connections.
Take the plunge.
Once I was flying out of the Rio airport and there was a problem with my visa and I had to spend HOURS...
Oh wait, not that kind of airport extreme...
I had one of the original "UFO" style AE's, and just recently upgraded to a flat one - not because the old one was broken, but because I wanted higher speeds for my newer equipment.
General overview: rock solid performance and hardware.
Caveat: it has occasionally been difficult to setup the wireless connection on our XBox360. That required a little bit of fussing around with the security settings, but ultimately was successful.
I also have a AE saucer and it works great, even connects my PS3 to the internet.
Go with what ya know
I recently got an Airport Extreme (N), primarily because I wanted to set up a WDS wireless network, and I already had an Airport Express (G)- this works so well, I've already ordered another Airport Express (N). I use the Extreme as a print server, but I have a separate NAS (Dlink DNS-323! w00t!) that I use to serve iTunes (and photos, and movies and DVDs that I've ripped, etc.). I don't think I'd try creating a WDS setup with a mixed Apple/Linksys environment, but this worked great. (Also, I have a large/bizarre collection of OS X, Win2k, WinXP, and Ubuntu machines connecting to, and printing via, this wireless network - no problems.)
GET A TIME CAPSULE!
Airport Extreme + automated wireless Time Machine backups
Can't beat it.
I have had one for a year and it has worked as well or better than the other routers I have had in the past. No real complaints other than the regular bizzaro dead spots, one of my walls must be lined with lead.
Go for it. Other than a few occasional hiccups, has been pretty solid. Good coverage...one is covering our entire house, 1100sq ft, and even the backyard.
I use Time Machine on it connected to a USB drive...works fine.
Do you think it's dumb to have to reboot your router and lose all your connections every time you change a single setting?
Do you want to be able to do any of the following?:
* Enable MAC address filtering
* Configure access restrictions
* Create VLANs
* Configure QoS
* Use Wake-on-LAN
* Set up a wireless bridge
* Create a hotspot separate from your internal network
* Have your router automatically register with a Dynamic DNS service
Would you like to be able to configure your router without installing special software on your computer?
Would you like to have a router with a non-broken list of wireless clients and DHCP leases?
If you answered 'Yes' to any of these questions, don't buy an Apple router. A company I work for has one, and I hate it. Give me a Linksys router with DD-WRT any day of the week. A million times more powerful and functional.
I've had an Airport Express and a Linksys WRT54GL (modded with dd-wrt) in my house for about 3 years. My DD-WRT doesn't reach half as far as the Airport express. I've cranked up the transmission strength on my Linksys to 251 mw, and still I barely get any signal through the wall. I swapped out my dd-wrt for an Airport Express (not an extreme!) and the thing reaches all throughout my apartment.
My only complaint is port forwarding and manual setup on the airport extreme. I've played with DD-WRT for awhile so I know how to setup basic featrues (WDS, Wireless setup, VPN configs, etc) but for the life of me I don't enjoy using the airport utlitlity to configure my routers.
I have no experience with the Airport Extreme, but I would always choose a AVM Fritz!Box, preferably the 7270-model. It has everything the Airport has and much, much more.
I've owned a half dozen and configured well over another dozen wireless routers over the years. The airports are the only ones that seem to ever work consistently. It pisses me off because the little bastards are expensive, but everything else I've ever bought has been a piece of crap. You're constantly resetting the damn things, half the PCs you try to use with them are unable to work with whatever particular flavor of WPA encryption the vendor has decided to partially support. It's a nightmare. Get the airport.
While we've got a Time Capsule rather than an Airport Extreme, they seem pretty similar (the built-in HD obviously excluded), and I've been pleasantly surprised by it. It's rock-solid, has decent range, looks nice, Airport Utility works great, and it's NAT-PMP implementation works especially well (I like poking ports open easily). I also find wireless printing oddly liberating as someone who rarely uses his computer on his desk.
The only real issue I have with it is that the Xbox 360 completely refuses to connect wirelessly to it, regardless of what I've tried, though the Wii and everything else I've tried works fine.
One thing I do recommend if you're planning to have any kind of even vaguely complicated network is that you have a read of the Designing Airport Networks doc, since it explains the various ways they can integrate into/create networks.
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/Designing_AirPort_Networks_10.5-Windows.pdf
http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Airport_Extreme_Gigabit_Setup_Guide.pdf
I have an Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) and I absolutely love it. I have gone through two Linksys routers before it - both which drove me absolutely nuts.
The AEBS has been very solid. I have an USB hub connected and have an external hard drive and my printer connected. I have had two hard drives connected to the AEBS and that work without any problems too.
Yes, the AEBS is more expensive than its competitors, but you end up getting what you pay for.
I owned the Extreme for about a year, most miserable year (internet wise) of my life. It frequently dropped the network, the speed (with just N enabled) was in the low B range, the NAS functionally did not work and would cause the whole router to lock up and require me to reset it, it would lock up about once a week or more out of the blue, along with all kinds of other awful little problems. (Like the WPA, which I assume Apple must have implemented in some backwards way, because it was only compatible with my laptop under Windows, but not Linux or anyone else's laptop.)
I eventually lent it to a friend that broke the wired port on her Mac, and I now use my dusty old Netgear G router, which gives me speeds ten times as fast with perfect reliability and complete control over the router (did I mention the Apple software holds your hand through the process--even in the advanced mode--making it excruciatingly annoying if you already know what you're doing?)
But hey, you have nothing but Macs, so worst case scenario they fuse and become a glossy white Skynet.
Here's an example of how Apple does things that I like.
One of my users had their wi-fi suddenly stop working for no apparent reason. I went to their apartment to check it out and after some experimenting discovered that one of their neighbors had purchased the same type of router (D-Link).
Both still had the default SSID ("D-Link", if I remember correctly) and the option to 'extend a wireless network', or 'bridge', I forget but in any event the two routers showed up as one, they were fighting over passwords, and basically both were killed off because the manufacturer didn't think that two of their products would be put in close proximity to each other in something like an apartment building.
Apple, on the other hand, appends the last part of the MAC to the device name, i.e., "Apple Network 1 2 3 4 a b" so you don't run into that problem.
Apple went the extra step with that one design decision, and they do that a lot, which is why I tend to recommend them.
I'm a Mac household and used to have Airport Extreme, but recently upgraded to Time Capsule. Although I didn't attempt this while I had my Airport Extreme in use, I did recently try it with Time Capsule. And that is, use Slingbox. Time Capsule is not uPnP compatible, which Slingbox requires for remote access. And although I don't know for sure, I doubt Airport Extreme is uPnP compatible, but only because Time Capsule isn't. Anyway, keep that in mind.
That said, my Time Capsule and Airport Extreme are the best wireless routers I've owned. Others included various Linksys products (not Mac friendly, the bastards) and Netgear. If you're a Mac shop and you don't need uPnP, Airport should be at or near the top of your list for consideration.
If you're not going with a DD-WRT router or a SoHo router like the Netgear FVS336G (plus wireless access point), definitely get a Time Capsule rather than the new Airport Extreme.
The 802.11n AE is practically deprecated now that the Time Capsule is available on the market. I realize there's a price difference, but unless you're dirt poor, the automatic Time Machine backup is totally worth it. Also, the USB storage on the Airport Extreme is officially unsupported; the retrograde hacks to re-enable it have all kinds of quirks that you don't want in a backup drive.
Get the 1TB Time Capsule.
p.s. Neither the AE or TC support dual 2.4GHz + 5GHz; they're either-or (which is kinda what this "draft N" / "pre-N" thing is all about). But since you already own a MacBook Pro and two Airport Expresses, just use the 5GHz 802.11a/n function; you can still use the same SSID for both.
Joel, all of the above commenters have good things to say. I wanted to remind you, though, that if you have an iPod/iPhone, you will be unable to stuff any of your remote library's music onto it. This is probably the most annoying DRM "feature" that Apple has implemented, and can fairly be said to have made me vomit with rage after I moved all of my music to my Linux box, shared it over iTunes with mt-daapd, and found that I could only play the music, not load it to my iPhone.
To that end, perhaps you want the 500GB Samsung M6 2.5" SATA hard drive for your MacBook Pro?
p.s. I do own a Time Capsule. I use it for automated backups (with Time Machine) and as a 5GHz 802.11a/n wireless access point, since DD-WRT doesn't reliably support any 802.11n routers last I checked.
p.p.s. I recently migrated from DD-WRT to the Netgear FVS336G as my router, though. DD-WRT is wonderful; I haven't gotten the hang of Netgear's interface yet... although technically under the hood it is also Linux. The two best features are having enough horsepower for IPsec or SSL-VPN, and its dual-WAN bandwidth aggregation. If you're getting DSL because it's the best you can do at your locale, but if you could you would pay for two DSL lines to get twice the bandwidth, the FVS336G will do that.
That Express/Extreme thing was some poor branding on Apple's part, I'll tell ya.
My biggest concerns would be
1) any non-mac machines (WPA and WEP p/word protection on non-Apple wireless cards can be unstable)
2) feature disparity. AirTunes isn't universal on the Express/Extreme/Time Capsule devices (stupid, stupid, stupid)
The flipside is a non-Apple router futzing with password protection on your Macs (a problem i've had with almost all .11g devices, but not N).
zuzu: As for storing your iTunes library elsewhere... that's fine, just as long as you keep your XML and structure docs/folders inside ~/music.
Using preferences to relocate where you actually store your audio files is fine.
But yeah, iTunes is finicky with that shit (unnecessarily so).
bear in mind that Western Digital Harddisks do not play well with the airport extreme
Thanks for the advice, guys. I ended up buying a 500GB Time Capsule. I honestly haven't had time to do anything except plug it in yet, but it really is quite lovely. I'll post some impressions in a week or so.
I replaced my Linksys router with an AE about 2 years ago and I'm never going back.
I have had zero problems with it since install and I run 1 newer iMac, an older iBook, an Alienware PC, my PS3, and my company Dell laptop off of it. It never crashes and seems to work so flawlessly I forget that it's there. Highly recommended!
p.s. I use it with a high speed cable connection, if that matters.
For anyone with 15 or 20Mbps symmetric FiOS (fibre-to-the-curb), this is a real problem (and why Verizon provisions the Actiontec MI-424WR, which is a nice piece of hardware running an awful OEM firmware operating system -- bastardized from BusyBox Linux). Though, people are working on porting DD-WRT to the MI424WR, since it does already run Linux and a RedBoot bootstrap.
However, 60Mbps raw or 11-15Mbps encrypted VPN throughput was also a major feature for getting a Netgear FVS336G -- which also runs Linux, boots with RedBoot, and has an onboard JTAG port.
Zuzu, I'd love to have bandwidth problems like yours. For my piddly 5mbps/768kbps, a DD-WRT micro router seems to be working just fine, although I have some weird bottlenecks on my Samba shares sometimes. I should tell you that I'm running Windows, not Mac, on my primary machine. iPhone still has manual file management. However, I did not know that you could drag files from the OS file viewer into the iTunes window. Thanks for the tip; I will try that out (assuming it works on Windows.)
Got mine about a year ago. Had some REALLY big issues with it resetting when I was on bittorrent. The only thing I can figure is that the number of connections was causing it to go wacky.
However, shortly after I got the thing, Apple released a couple of patches. The first seemed to make it work with torrents, then the second one fixed it completely.
No issues with UPnP at all, nor with the NAS. I have seen weirdness with the XBOX 360, but it has been a long time since I had to change the XBOX settings.
It really is a great wifi point. Very happy I got it.
I'm still using a UFO-style Airport Extreme because It Just Works, and I've helped a few people set up the newer ones. About the only downsides to the Airport Extreme/Time Capsule/etc.:
-You'd better have a Mac for configuration.
-Heat is an issue. The Apple products handle it better than most of the small routers out there (I'm lookin' at you, Linksys), but despite the temptation to set things on top of the flat surface of the newer ones, you need to leave room around them (particularly above) for airflow. If you MUST set something on top of one, go to Radio Shack and spring for the biggest rubber feet that can find.
-For some models, there are two different configuration programs: the normal one and an Admin utility that you can grab from apple.com. The Admin utility really shouldn't be a separate program.
Other than that, they perform flawlessly.
DD-WRT ($0.00)
+
Asus WL-500w ($100.00)
+
500 GB External Hard drive ($100.00)
DD-WRT v24 supports external disks for NAS
I've had Airport Extreme Alien Edition, it worked solidly but without 1/10th the features DD-WRT offers.
Besides my favorite TCP tunnelling, you can setup virtual wireless interfaces, all with differing security protocols, passwords, etc.
There will be issues if you try and do WDS with the Airport Expresses with WPA encryption on DD-WRT, but if you're just using them as wireless bridges, you'll be okay. Unless, you're trying to stream audio to speakers, via Express. I don't think that is possible, yet.
I have had an extreme since the new generation came out. I also have two "g" generation expresses. The whole setup worked great with 10.4, it sucks with 10.5. Apple changed the remote hard drive function to more of a server setup where you have to log into it every time. I loose connection to the server whenever I take my computer out of the house or whenever it goes to sleep, which often crashes the whole setup. Most importantly, IT IS SLOOOW! Much slower now that I converted to Leopard. I used to be able to stream movies from my external hard drive, now every movie, even compressed movies, crash almost immediately. Itunes does work on it pretty well. I keep hoping, with every Leopard update, that they will address some of my problems, they never do. I have even taken the whole setup into the Genius bar, and they couldnt make it work any better. I am now contemplating going back to 10.4.
IMO it's totally worth getting a AExtreme - especially if you already have an AExpress.
I have both with my express acting as a wireless to to wired bridge to my xbox 360 (works flawlessly with 'open' NAT) and airtunes to my media centre.
It's especially handy to be able to set up a wired access point with the express if you ever need it.
I used this when i reformatted my winXP machine (I normally use a macbook pro) and couldn't find a hard-copy of the drivers for the wireless card.
However, the usb drive access can be a little slow and it takes a bit of fooling around to get the network to happily interact with windows XP.
Hope this helps.