Hey, I never thought of that. I’ve used a travel version of the Linksys, but PC World points out the AirPort Express makes a nice travel router since it is just essentially a wall wart. Also you can use it as a cheap way to get a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g network while AirPort Base Station Extreme is used for a wide channel 5GHz 802.11n network.
Archive for the ‘Airport Express’ Category
Rockin’ Fast Network
Mar 24th, 08
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Normally at work, we have two networks, an unprotected and a protected wifi network, here’s a cool way to implement this. We are going to try this at our Seattle office.
Internally
If you are lucky, you have all new machines from Apple (yeah!) that are 802.11n. These are all the late model MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. So now you can have a fast and much safer network. Here is what you need to do:
Set, your AirPort Utility>Airport>Wireless to 802.11n (5GHz) and “use wide channels”. What this does is to push all those MacBooks into the fresh air of 5GHz out of all those 2.4GHz standard cards. That means you have clean radio frequencies and if you aren’t pushing range (2.4GHz propagates better than 5GHz) like an open office, you are going to go from 130Mbps to 270Mbps because wide channel uses twice the channel width so you get double the data. It is also safer in that most laptops only have 2.4GHz radios and should have less interference.
I’ve tried this with an Time Capsule and the results are a little surprising. Copying a 350MB file, here are the speeds I got:
| Upload to TC | Download to Mac | ||
| 802.11n wide channel 5GHz | Macbook Air | 22MBps | 78MBps |
| 802.11n (b/g compatibility 2.4GHz | Macbook Air | 6MBps | 6MBps |
So the loading seems asymmetric as if the MacBook Air has some other issues. The 78MBps is pretty impressive for real world through compared with the 300Mbps theoretical maximum (or 30MBps). The 22MBps seems closer to what is real, so maybe there is some buffering or something going on. Both are impressive though compared with the 802.11n/b/g performance. As an aside, this is with a single computer no the network, so all this bandwidth has to be shared, that is why switched wired Ethernet is still better, each port-to-port connection gets the full 100Mbps or 1Gbps (in Gigabit case).
The conventional 802.11n with a theoretic capacity of 108Mbps seems about right. It is symmetric with a true over the air throughput of 6MBps (about 60Mbps) and on the disk, I get 5.5MBps of disk transfer.
External
Then you can setup another Airport Base Station Extreme or even an el cheapo Airport to 802.11b/g at 2.4GHz and leave this open. This lets devices that are presumably not from your company in. I would put this on the open Internet so folks can have basic access and such.
Apple ships 802.11n Airport Express and 1Gb Ethernet notebooks
Mar 16th, 08
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Macrumors.com says the $99 Airport Express is going to get 802.11n networking. This is a very nice piece of hardware that complements the Time Capsule mainly. You can use it to add a printer to your network (in essence, it converts a USB printer into a network printer), you can use it as an access point (although it only supports 10 users, that’s all most folks would need), and if you don’t have a wired Ethernet, you can use it to extend your wireless network (it actually “bridges” or rebroadcasts up the chain). With 802.11n, most homes will just need a Time Capsule and then every so often a $99 Airport Express to have a great network throughout a home or small business.
And as another aside, I forgot to mention the update generation of MacBook and MacBook Pros (but not Airs) now have 1Gb Ethernet, so paired with a Time Capsule or Airport Extreme, you can have very fast wifi networking (802.11n is as fast as 100Mbps Ethernet) and for really high performance for video and the sort, you can use gigabit Ethernet. Nice Apple!