New adventures in Wi-fi (with Apple’s Airport Express)

After much deliberation about when and how to go wireless in our home, last week I finally took the plunge with a purchase of an Airport Express from Apple.


Having done a lot of reading up about different wireless routers only served to increase my confusion on the subject matter. I live in quite a big house (3 floors, 4 bedrooms) and trying to find the right information on whether any of these wireless devices would work in my situation was difficult.

  • Did the wireless router have a modem?
  • Would the range be good enough?
  • What the hell where these N,G,G+ standards?
  • Would it work with my imac

The other options

I considered Apple’s Time Capsule but decided the price of it (£199) was just too high. I then considered Apple’s Airport Extreme. Again, the price for this seemed high at £119 and considering for an extra £80, I’d get automatic Time machine backups, it seemed like a waste.

Other options, from companies such as Netgear, D-link were also available but despite their websites stating that their hardware would work with macs, I also read elsewhere that they required extra adapters/wireless cards for optimal performance.

Airport Express to the rescue

After speaking to my boss, he told me that most likely, Apple’s Airport Express option would be good enough but, at £65 it seemed so cheap in comparison to Apple’s other similar products and the reviews I read about it made it seem like this was a really limited piece of hardware.

One week after buying the Airport Express, I am really happy. I have wif-fi in my house at last and I can, in theory, pick up my imac and move it round the house at a whim. This was proved when on Friday afternoon, my entire office moved upstairs to the top floor where it will remain until the end of this/next month when our main bedroom (my old office) gets renovated.

Set-up

Set-up was really easy too, it must have took about 10 minutes. For the record, I am the type of person who doesn’t like to read instructions and thankfully, I didn’t have to, I simply popped in the CD and everything just set itself up with the me just clicking continue every now and again.

Some facts/details

If you’re thinking of buying an Airport Express maybe these details will help.

  • My house is a 3 storey Victorian mid terrace, it has plenty of brick walls and some studded walls. The floors are generally original floorboards.
  • The Airport Express has no modem so it must be plugged in to one. This means two pieces of electrical items plugged in at once.

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