Review: Apple Airport Extreme Draft-N router

Ordinarily, we might pass over Apple’s new Airport Extreme wireless base station as being a Mac-only product.

However, there’s a big logo on the box that says "Mac + PC", so we were curious to see if Apple could bring its famed ease of use to the PC market. Unfortunately, we were a little disappointed with the results.

Like most wireless devices coming onto the market right now, the Airport Extreme uses the draft-802.11n wireless standard, which provides both higher speeds and greater range than 802.11g standard when used with other 802.11n kit.

It doesn’t have an ADSL or cable modem built into it, so you’ll need a separate Ethernet modem to provide your internet connection.

However, the Airport Extreme is less expensive than rival products, such as Belkin’s N1 (£130), which combines modem and wireless router into a single device, so it’s not a bad way of upgrading an existing network to the draft-802.11n standard if you already have an Ethernet modem.

All new Core 2 Duo Macs (except the 17in, 1.83Ghz iMac) can be upgraded to draft-802.11n wireless via a software download from the Apple Store, costing £1.25.

You connect your modem to the Wan connector on the back of the unit, and there are three additional Ethernet ports next to this, allowing you to make conventional wired connections as well. There’s also a USB port, which usefully allows you to connect either a printer or hard disk that can then be shared on the network as well.

Not surprisingly, the Airport Extreme worked perfectly when we connected a Mac to it. Speeds were similar to other draft-N kit we've tested, hitting TCP speeds around 30-35Mbits/sec. However, performance will vary wildly depending on your surroundings.

Unfortunately, the Windows version of Apple’s Airport Utility that we installed on our PC stubbornly refused to detect the Airport Extreme. Oddly, though, the software supplied with our PC’s wireless adaptor (from Netgear) did a better job and allowed us to connect to the network successfully.

So, while the Airport Extreme is the obvious choice for Mac users who want to upgrade their network, Apple still needs do to a little more work on the Windows side of things.

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