Today were going to talk about the old airport extreme base station.
even though these were manufactured starting in 2003
they are still very capable devices and can be bought used for $20 or less.
I bought this one on eBay for $17 with free shipping.
Now, my home network is more sophisticated than many businesses.
and my primary router and wireless access point is an Apple Airport Express.
Its a very nice little device that costed me around $99.
the trouble is, I need more coverage of the other side of my home.
So i bought this older model to help extend range.
one of the fascinating things about these things is that if you take them apart
you'll discover there's a actual apple airport extreme card inside.
this is the same car that was used by the iBook and Powerbook G4 systems that were
being produced at that time.
these little metal pieces here or actually the dual antennas.
let's talk about the specifications
this model supports wireless B and G, which means it supports speeds up to 54Mbit/sec.
which is plenty for surfing the web
and is even several times faster than my cable mode.
so i don't see the need for anything faster.
it supports WDS
wireless distribution system
which means they could actually work as repeater to extend the range of your
wireless network without
actually being connected to an ethernet cable
It can support up to 50 wireless devices at once.
And it can also work as a router for your internet connection either
wired or wireless.
some models also support power over ethernet so they can be powered directly
from a hub or switch.
let's go over the ports on the back
The first port on the left is for an external antenna.
this is the reset button
if you buy one of these used like I did, you'll need to perform a factory reset
by holding this button down for thirty seconds on power up.
this first ethernet port is the WAN port.
If you were going to use this as a router, this is where you would connect your cable modem or DSL modem.
The next port is your LAN port. This is where you would connect to a hub or switch.
believe it or not this is a built-in dial-up modem
fairly obsolete for today, I doubt anyone will be using this
and this is a usb port where you can attach a printer
and at last this is the power port. Speaking of, if you buy one of these on ebay
be sure to check that it includes a power adapter. I've seen a lot of these
for sale without it which is pretty useless
I should also mention that if you have a newer mac, the airport utility will
recognize this device but it will not allow you to configure it
you'll need to download the airport utility version5.6 in order
configure it.
So I'm going to say this is a rare instance where a piece of technology like this
despite being over ten years old is still just as useful today as it was
when it was manufactured back in 2003. In fact, I can take that
one step further and say it's probably more useful today than it was in 2003
because there are a lot more wireless devices available now than there
were back then.
and it seems to work with them all. I have used this with iPads,
iPhones, iPods, MacBooks and uh...
even some PC laptops and it works just fine with everything.
so to summarize, this is a very very inexpensive wireless base station
can buy for less than $20 that i dare say is better built than
of the modern ones are today
by third party manufacturers,
So I would highly recommend it, even as your only access point.
it's also worth mentioning that there also exist something called an airport
graphite
which looks
very similar to this but it's made several years earlier
and uh... i would not advise purchasing it
because it only supports wireless B and is much more difficult to configure
requiring even more obsolete software.
so just make sure it's white in color and you should be good