Is an Apple Airport Extreme the best fit for my situation?

Joined
Jan 27, 2007
Messages
5,658
Reaction score
159
Points
63
Location
*Brisvegas*
Your Mac's Specs
17 inch 2 GHz C2D imac (5,1) with 3GB DDR2 RAM, X1600 (128MB memory) GPU - OSX 10.6.3
Hi,

At the moment I have a imac. White C2D, 2ghz cpu. And I have a wired Netcomm MB1300 Plus4 router. All of this is upstairs. But the outlet on the wall phone line for my ADSL is down stairs so I have a long cord from the outlet up the stairs to my router. And the outlet has a double adaptor on it. One long out to my router and one line out to the phone. And I'm pretty sure my imac has 802.11 a/b/g/n.

So that above is my set up now. And my concern is I don't want a trailing cord going up the stairs to my router. It's so annoying. So could I buy an Apple Extreme router, hook it up to my phone line and park it down stairs. But let it's wireless capabilities send the ADSL internet through the air to my imac upstairs? That would work yes?

And say I closed the door upstairs to the room with my imac in it. Would the wireless signal from the Apple router reach my imac ok?

And I have a Wii downstairs. I'm pretty sure I could use the Apple extreme to get it online. Currently I use my above setup with then airport from the imac (upstairs) to get the Wii online (downstairs) and it works alright. Would this be easy to set up with the Apple extreme?

Whu I'm asking all these questions is because I've never used a wireless router. And I want to know if it's preformance is as good as a wired one. I only have ADSL1 because my garbage *** of a government here will not update my local exchange to ADSL2.

And would there be a better priced option then the Apple Extreme. Sure I am partial to Apple products. I really like them. But $229 Australian seems a lot for a wireless router. And it'd be only for the convience of not having a trailing cord uo the stairs which I really do not like. That's really the only reason I'm looking into this. Oh and one day using it as a wi-fi hotspot for a potential future ipad. My current router is strictly wired only.

Should I go wireless or just live with the cord and not buy anything?

So what do you all think? What would be best option for me?

And hypothetically if I get one of these Apple Extremes I have to set some WEP encryption on it yes? 40bit or 128bit sounds just fine. I'll just have to work out which one is best for me. But would people try to steal bandwith from your wireless network? Has anyone had any experience on this subject?

Does Apple update the firmware on these routers to keep them up to date? Or is it by new hardware (the next gen airport) to keep up to date?

Thank you in advance.

[edit] It says on the apple website. Environmental requirements
* Operating temperature: 10° to 35° C
for the Apple Extreme. But in sunny Queensland we at times can get up to 45 C on ocassion. This won't affect it at all? I think not as I've not once heard this being an issue. But best I ask right? :)
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top