Apple Airport Extreme Base Station (Winter 2009)

7/10 Great Performance With Some Annoyances

anogee - 10/28/09

I got this wireless router because my D-Link one had become unreliable. I opened the box and this router is beautiful, packaged in typical Apple style, although it didn't setup in typical style, and in fact it was a nightmare to setup. This router doesn't use the typical web page setup, instead it uses something that could be easier but wasn't for me. You plug the thing in, connect to its unencrypted Wi-Fi signal, then launch its config utility. (Both Mac and PC ones are included.) Seems easy enough. I have a Mac with the latest updates, so just opened the Airport utility on the Mac and it found the Airport. Cool. But then received this message that this utility is not the correct version for my Airport. O.K. Went to the Apple site and got the latest Airport utility, installed it. Still, same error. So I installed the CD with the device. That one worked, but ... the next step was for the utility to connect to the Airport and download config info. Nope. Some long 4 digit error saying it couldn't download the config date from the Airport. Tried two more Macs, nope, same error. So wired the Airport to my Ethernet, and tried a wired PC. With the PC utility, that did work. Its pretty sad when you need a PC to configure an Apple product. So, lets get to the good and bad. Performance was great, but features are very limited. For example, it CAN assign IP addresses based on a device MAC address, BUT, unlike every other router I have ever seen, it doesn't give you a list of connected devices and their MAC addresses to select from. Instead you have to run to each device, write down their MAC address, and enter it manually. As far as I can see, there are no QoS controls, no way to turn on or off ping responses on the WAN, and very limited access restriction rules. You can open ports to the outside world, but it doesn't appear that programs can open these ports for you. Also, there are only 3 LAN ports (instead of the usual 4), no LEDs to indicate activity on each port, and only one multi-color LED on the front to indicate MANY conditions. Other thing missing are a way to see which wireless clients are connected. It has the screen for this, but none of my 5+ wireless clients appear in this window. Also, not much indication if its using 2.4GHz or 5GHz to connect. A feature it does have is you can save multiple configurations, in memory, instead of the typical file on your Mac or PC. This is a really nice feature. You can also have Guest access with limits which is nice as well. So to summarize, very good performance, and no lockups so far, which is really most important, but also not a lot of features. If you are the techie type, this router is probably not for you, but it does have the most important features.