In Brief

Apple was the first company to ship a consumer Wi-Fi router, back before it was even called Wi-Fi. And now it's the first again to ship a dual-band 2.4/5GHz draft-802.11n router, pushing wireless speeds to 270Mbps, or five times that of 802.11g. True to Apple form, the revamped AirPort Extreme also boasts several innovative new features that will likely soon become de rigeur for all Wi-Fi routers. Our favorite is a simple one-time guest access feature that lets visitors use your Wi-Fi net, without having to give out your password. Another incredibly helpful feature is the ability to reserve IP addresses for specific devices, so you'll always know where your Slingbox is, for example.

Like its predecessor, also called AirPort Extreme, the "extremer" version can be configured from either Macs or PCs with a software utility. Also like its predecessor, there is no Web-based interface, something we greatly prefer since it avoids operating system issues. That said, the software utility is excellent, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, inadequate documentation of many of the more-advanced features, as well as some missing elements, greatly hinders its usefulness. Apple's obsession with streamlining and simplicity goes a little too far here, omitting some standard features found in other routers, or making them hard to find by using different nomenclature and organization. If you've never gotten past the main screen of a Wi-Fi router before, and don't need advanced network configuration features, the Extreme will be a joy to set up. If you're a network pro, it can be an exercise in frustration. (This probably says a lot about the Extreme's intended audience.)

Network pros will also bemoan the lack of a gigabit Ethernet switch (a mystery given that all current Macs include gigabit, or 1,000Mbps Ethernet) and the throttling of 2.4GHz 802.11n to just half its potential performance. On the other hand, the Extreme has very good WDS support, allowing setup of mesh networks to cover entire offices or larger homes, and next-gen IPv6 addressing. And the built-in USB printer and hard disk sharing will solve huge issues for many a small mixed-platform network.

If you have a Mac-centric home or small-office network, the new Extreme is a no-brainer for its support of Mac technologies like AFP, HFS+ volumes, and Bonjour networking that you simply can't get anywhere else, together with vastly improved performance and range compared to the 802.11g version. But if you need gigabit Ethernet support, maximum wireless performance, and advanced network configuration features, draft-n routers from companies like Buffalo, D-Link, Linksys and Netgear will serve you better.

In Depth

To set up the AirPort Extreme, you first have to install the AirPort Utility software on your Mac OS 10.4+ or Windows XP machine. If you have an older Mac without Tiger, you're out of luck, due to the aforementioned lack of a Web setup utility. Official Vista support is not here yet, although Apple promises it is coming. On Windows machines, Apple's Bonjour networking technology will also get installed; and both platforms receive a small AirPort Disk Utility for connecting to shared USB hard drives. Finally, owners of most Core 2 Duo MacBooks and iMacs will get the hidden 802.11n capability in their AirPort Extreme cards unlocked (this costs $1.99 otherwise).

Opening the AirPort Utility leads you right into the setup process, which guides you through selecting names for your Wi-Fi net and base station, plus passwords for base station and USB drive access as well as Wi-Fi encryption. We like the fact that it's tough to avoid setting passwords for these critically important security measures. Oddly, the assisted setup does NOT include a screen for choosing your wireless radio mode, such as 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n, 2.4GHz n-only, 5GHz a/n, or 5GHz n-only. By default, 802.11b/g/n is supposed to be selected, although for some reason, our unit started in 5GHz a/n mode, which caused us grief with our 802.11g clients until we figured out what was going on. The clue came in the Summary screen, where we saw channel 36, a 5GHz channel. Oddly again, the Summary does not indicate what radio mode is operational.

Routing Features

Once you've completed the initial setup, you can go back and explore the other settings (or bypass the assistant altogether by choosing Manual Setup from the Base Station menu). Under the Internet Connection tab, you can switch your AirPort into bridge mode with just one setting, a real convenience. Other standard settings include wireless mode and channel selection, MAC address control and remote configuration through the WAN port. There's also timed access control for specific devices, so you can limit your kids' Internet hours, for example.

However, there's no MAC address cloning, and no easy way to stealth all your ports, things we are used to doing with other routers. Apple's new twists are mostly grouped under the Advanced area, where you can experiment with wide-area Bonjour hostnames, something that Apple hints will be important for future products (perhaps remote access to your AppleTV?), and IPv6 addressing. IPv6 is the next-generation Internet address protocol, which is just starting to come into use. Few people use it yet, but if you're one of the ones that do, this support will be key. Other routing features include port mapping and default host support.

But our favorite is the ability to reserve specific IP addresses for specific devices. On a recent trip, we lost connection to our Slingbox Pro when it grabbed a new IP address after a power outage. Since we had to open a port for the original IP address so that the Slingbox could be seen from the Web, this change caused it to disappear. With Apple's reservation system, the Slingbox will always get 10.0.1.5, no matter how many other devices are on the network. Note that this system does not require you to set static IP addresses within the devices themselves, which is often difficult in the case of set-top boxes, or problematic in the case of devices that roam to other networks, like your laptop or PDA. Reservations make it simple to find printers, network drives, Webcams, media servers and other devices on the net -- you'll always know their IP addresses.

Another way-cool feature is the ability to allow one-time guest access with the click of a button, without giving out your encryption password. You can even limit those guests to 24 hours of time -- potentially making it useful as a paid hotspot solution for small establishments like bed-and-breakfasts. The PIN access option show in the screen below will work with "future" devices that Apple could not name for us yet.

If you have a large home or office to cover, the Extreme has good WDS (wireless distribution system) support for using multiple AirPorts in a seamless roaming network. Be sure to check out the Designing AirPort Extreme 802.11n Networks guide available on the Apple Support site. This manual, which should have been included on the AirPort CD along with the cursory setup guide, also shows how to set up simultaneous 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks by keeping your old AirPort as a 2.4GHz router for 802.11b/g clients, and your new Extreme as a 5GHz router for 802.11n clients. This way your critical 802.11n devices (like AppleTV) will stay in the fast lane without interference from legacy clients or neighboring networks.

Hardware Design

Design-wise, the AirPort Extreme is a model of spare and elegant form, like all Apple products. It's so simple, in fact, that it has just one indicator light on the front, compared to the typical bank of flashers on most routers. Even the previous Extreme had three lights. This creates a situation where the lone light flashes amber instead of solid green for multiple reasons, making it hard to diagnose problems without firing up the AirPort utility and poking around. With the usual Internet or Ethernet indicators, for example, you can tell at a glance if your broadband modem or Ethernet connections are acting up, and reboot the modem or replug cables without having to fish around ind software. We understand that many home users don't care about indicator lights, but this is definitely a case of less is not more. We also have a love/hate relationship with the lack of external antennae, something Apple seems very proud of. While that makes for a clean look and nothing to break off, given its subpar performance and range for an 802.11n router (more on this below), we also suspect it has a big impact on both. With adjustable antennae, you can tweak things for best reception.

What we do like is that the box will stack nicely with your AppleTV. We also like the rear of the unit, which has several welcome additions not present on the earlier version, notably three free 100Mbps Ethernet ports in addition to the WAN port for your broadband modem, plus a USB 2.0 port for connecting printers and/or hard drives. This feature lets you share standard, inexpensive peripherals among both Macs and PCs, without having to attach them to an always-on computer, and is a real boon for home and small office networks that can't justify the purchase of an Ethernet printer or NAS drive. The USB port accepts powered hubs, so you can connect multiple drives and printers. We tested the Extreme with a Kensington PocketHub 7-port USB hub, along with a Canon Pixma IP4200 printer and two Maxtor OneTouch III USB hard drives (both pocket versions that drew power from the hub).

Printer & Disk Sharing

All three USB devices showed up in the AirPort Utility software after a reboot, and we could print right away to the Pixma (although note that printer sharing only works on Windows XP or Mac OS 10.2.7+). Twice we lost access to the Pixma due to error conditions like out of paper, but rebooting the AirPort brought it back again. The hard drives took a little more work to get up and running. On our Windows XP Pro machine (a Dell Inspiron), we continually failed to connect to the drives with the AirPort Disk Utility, in spite of being able to see and configure them within the main AirPort Utility software running on the same machine. Finally, we tried bypassing the AirPort Disk Utility, and just opening the drive from our Workgroup in My Network Places. It showed up there just fine, and we copied files back and forth without incident. You just need to enter your workgroup name in the AirPort Utility to be able to access your shared drives this way. On the Mac, the AirPort Disk Utility is a startup item that can sit in your menubar, making sure you keep connected to network drives at all times. It worked almost too well -- our MacBook Pro ran noticeably hotter after installing it. We ended up turning it off, and using the manual connection mode instead.

You can control access to shared drives with a password, and create user accounts, however, all drives must use the same settings, so you can't have one public drive with no password, and another with passwords and user accounts, for example. Both Mac and PC format drives are supported, and they can be unplugged from the AirPort and connected directly to a computer for normal operation. If you had user accounts set up, folders for each account will appear in the Users folder on the drive. The folders are not encrypted, so all data is accessible by anyone directly connected. So don't rely on AirPort Disk for secure storage, it's mainly useful for casual file sharing. (It's worth noting that we had to uncover most of this information by trial and error, there is no documentation that explains the ins and out of USB disk sharing.)

Performance-wise, the shared drive facility is no great shakes, we copied about 80MB worth of files in two minutes from computer to computer, that took 30 minutes to copy to one of the Maxtor drives attached to the AirPort. To be fair, performance of drives on similar USB ports on other routers is also sluggish -- internal SATA drives are inherently faster. If you want to move large amounts of data around your local network, or secure user partitions, you need a true NAS drive, preferably a gigabit one attached to a gigabit router or switch.

Performance and Range

The first time we fired up the Extreme in 5GHz mode, we trotted eagerly up to our upstairs bedroom to see how much performance would improve over the Belkin Pre-N router we'd been using before. But there was nothing to measure. The Extreme did not even show up on the list of available routers in the MacBook's AirPort menu. A big let-down. The Belkin had provided a weak signal, but it was still usable for email and surfing. After talking to Apple about the issue, they said that 5GHz network range is actually less than that of 2.4GHz, due to faster signal attenuation, and that 2.4GHz networks will have 30 percent greater range. Sure enough, when we switched to 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n mode with the Extreme, we got a 2-bar signal upstairs. It was roughly similar in performance to the Belkin's when used with our 802.11g MacBook Pro, although both could vary widely. On the other hand, with a 802.11n MacBook, the signal was strong and stable with 5 bars, a vast improvement over the Belkin. (Which is already a vast improvement over a standard 802.11g router.)

We also did a series of same-room comparison tests against Netgear's RangeMax Next Gigabit Edition draft-n router and card, to see how the AirPort stacked up against a leading competitor, and also to test adapter interoperability. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the Netgear adapter could attach to the AirPort in 802.11b/g/n mode at a link rate of 130Mbps, showing that it was being recognized as an 802.11n client. Similarly, our MacBook with 802.11n could connect to the Netgear at link rates above 100Mbps (as shown in the Mac Network Utility). In 802.11b/g/n mode, the AirPort outclassed the Netgear in performance by a small margin, even though it is throttled down to 20MHz channels (other draft-n routers, including the Netgear, have 40MHz "wide" channel modes that double performance to the maximum 300Mbps). This is likely due to the fact that there a number of neighboring Wi-Fi networks, so the Netgear would automatically drop down to 20MHz channels to avoid interfering with them, thus putting the two routers on the same level.

But the AirPort Extreme prevents you from using 2.4GHz wide channels at all, neighboring Wi-Fi nets or not, thus limiting 802.11n performance to a mere 144Mbps. Apple cites the potential for interference with frequency-hopping 2.4GHz Bluetooth nets as the reason for the bandwidth throttling. Connections to Bluetooth devices like keyboards, mice and headsets can become flakey in the presence of wide Wi-Fi channels, which use almost the entire 2.4GHz band. We've never experienced this problem, probably because we only use Bluetooth outside of the house. Apple should at least make this an option, rather than a pre-emption, since many people don't use Bluetooth devices at home and would rather take advantage of the extra speed.

Which brings us to 5GHz performance. Here is where the AirPort really shines. As long as you stay within its more-limited range, the 5GHz mode affords much speedier and more reliable operation than 2.4GHz, due to the relative lack of interference. Since you probably have an 802.11g router already, we think most Extreme buyers should set up dual networks, using the AirPort for 5GHz clients, and the old router for 2.4GHz traffic. Running both g and n clients in 802.11b/g/n mode can greatly reduce n performance, although g clients will get better range.

Compatibility & Interoperability

One of our biggest concerns about the new AirPort Extreme was the lack of any Apple-supplied upgrade path to draft-802.11n for pre-Core 2 Duo machines, which is most of the Mac installed base. Apple also would not give us any examples of compatible 802.11n Windows cards, despite the prominent "Mac/PC" labeling on the router, thus providing no guidance to potential Window purchasers. Fortunately, some third parties and intrepid testers are starting to fill the gap, although much work remains. For owners of Core Duo Macs, QuickerTek has developed an 802.11n upgrade kit that costs $149, or $199 plus shipping if you have them do the installation (which is not trivial).

For Windows cards, the issue is whether they will connect and run at 802.11n speeds, rather than the slower 802.11g, and whether they will connect in 5GHz mode at all. If you have an existing Windows 802.11n card in your laptop, we recommend taking it in to an Apple store and testing the connection before making the leap, or at the very least, searching the Web to see if other users with your card have been successful. Once the Wi-Fi Alliance starts certifying draft-802.11n devices later this year, this problem should disappear, since certification brings with it the (supposed) guarantee of interoperability with other draft-n devices.

Conclusions

Apple's new AirPort Extreme is aimed squarely at Mac-centric homes and small offices that may have some Windows machines mixed in, and it serves that market very well, with a competitive price, a carefully selected mix of features including printer and disk sharing and 5GHz support, and a streamlined setup assistant that presses all the right security buttons. We'd dearly like to see a gigabit switch in there to speed up backups and file transfers over the wired network, but you can't have everything -- that would probably bring the price tag up to $199 or so, out of most consumers' comfort range.

If you need pro routing features and gigabit support, there are better solutions out there, but for most users, the Extreme covers all the bases, and then some, fast and elegantly.