Apple has had a long tradition of being the most competent device manufacturers around that present both high quality performance along with the minimalist, well suited design that has become the norm of the day. With the Apple Airport Extreme wireless access base, Apple has strived to and achieved what they had started off with the basic Apple Airport device – a performer in the arena of wi-fi hotspots and router bases. The Airport Extreme is a highly engaging simultaneous dual-band 802.11g router, that is it can work with both the 2.4GHz spectrum and the 5GHz spectrum. You can also attach a USB hard drive to the female connectors behind the Extreme and that will automatically become a shared hard drive in the entire network – true portability and wireless fidelity!
The installation is starkly simple, differing from the usual rout of scurrying back to the manual and looking up complicated diagrams and jargon that is usually the case when routers or wi-fi bases are to be configured. Connect the bridge cable, DSL modem or router’s Ethernet cord to the Apple Airport Extreme device and it is ready to go. The supported number of devices, according to the Apple website, is 50. However performance has been known to drop when there are more than 20 devices connected to the same router.
The connectors include a LAN and a WAN port, which means this wi-fi base can also serve as a “bridge” server between many computers in a LAN. Thus sharing of files, playing multiplayer games and other social goodies are all at the disposal of the user. Printers with USB plugs can also be shared around the network because of the simplicity of the Universal Serial Bus port’s plug and play property. The basic model does not come with the network cords – a minor grumble for all those basic network architects who wish to start from scratch and would like a one-fix solution to their networking woes. Security is very well done in the Extreme with features such as SSID and controllable radius of broadcasting available with the right configuration.
That said, the Apple Airport Extreme is only “extreme” when it concerns the 802.11g spectrum. When used with the 802.11b spectrum, it is sluggish in comparison, as the 2.4GHz frequency’s speed has not been improved in all this time. It pales in comparison to the speed in the 5GHz frequency which is decidedly fast.
