All New Aiport Extreme
January 12, 2007
Out of all the new products announced at Macworld the one that got me in a “I want one NOW!” state wasn’t even mentioned by Steve in his keynote. The new Airport Extreme router.
I own a previous generation Airport Extreme router which I later switched out for a Linksys WRT54gs as the Airport suffered a bit with range. Besides the range issues I was quite happy with it, it performed well, was easy to setup and I could share my HP 7660 photo printer over the network which was handy.
The new Airport Extreme sports some new specs and features:
- Support for 802.11 a/b/g/n
- Airport Disk
- Time Based Access control
- 10/100BASE-T – Wan Port
- 3× 10/100BASE-T – Lan Ports
- USB Port
Support for 802.11n is of course one of the key features, since Apple is clearly expecting you to pick up one of these to use in conjunction with the AppleTV for streaming high quality video wirelessly. 802.11n promises up to 5x the performance and twice the range of 802.11g, range being something key for me, since whilst my home isn’t the biggest, it has a lot of walls that prevent weaker signals travelling very far.
The huge feature that I’m interested in though is Airport Disk which allows you to plug in a hard drive to the USB port on the back and then share it with anyone on the network. You can even plug in a hub and have multiple hard drives and printers shared over the network. I wouldn’t imagine you can plug in many though as there are power limits on USB ports.
Naturally there’s a new Airport Disk application too and this allows you to configure password protected or read only shares and even automatically mount the network volumes when you connect to the network.
Then we have all of the usual security features:
- WPA/WPA2 and WEP 128-bit encryption
- MAC Filtering
- NAT Firewall
- Support for RADIUS authentication
- Time based parental access control
Purely because of Airport Disk and 802.11n support (and because it looks pretty nice too) I’ll be picking up one of these the moment they’re available in February. Retailing at £119 it’s a bit pricey but comparable to other 802.11n routers with this functionality.
I might miss the “tweak-ability” of DD-WRT firmware which I’m running now, but having networked volumes and printer sharing that doesn’t require me having my iMac on all the time when I want to print from my laptop will just about sway me.
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