"Following the original AirPort Base Station, Apple introduced several new base stations with upgrades including multiple Ethernet ports, 54 Mbps "AirPort Extreme" (802.11g) and USB printer sharing, plus a compact "AirPort Express" base station with the ability to stream iTunes music to a stereo system via its audio out port."

"Not all of these base stations were completely successful, however ? AirPort Express had various audio issues, and the first AirPort Base Stations suffered failures from defective hardware. And none of them, it turned out, offered as strong a wireless signal as a full-sized antenna could provide."

"Over time, Apple saw its wireless leadership erode as less expensive and more capable wireless base stations became available from other manufacturers. Nearly eight years after introducing high-speed wireless networking to the world, Apple has become a niche player in the market it created ? sound familiar?"

"For its brand new AirPort Extreme 802.11n Base Station, priced at $179.99, Apple added new features, redesigned the enclosure, overhauled the configuration software (which runs on Windows PCs as well as Macs) and touts the ultra-high speed of a preliminary 802.11n networking standard accessible from its very latest Mac models (excepting the Mac Mini). Will this be enough to revitalize Apple's flagging wireless product line?"

"Apple's design obsession with rounded rectangles continues with the new AirPort Extreme, which is a white, flat square shape with a footprint exactly matching the Mac Mini's. The rubber base keeps it from sliding around, and it's quite dense, weighing in at 1.66 pounds (0.753 kg)."

"Our test unit is warm to the touch, even when idle. When kept very busy, it got noticeably warmer. Apple's environmental specifications list 95°F (35°C) as the maximum temperature operating temperature. We don't know if it's possible to overheat this unit, but we wouldn't advise stacking books or other insulating materials on top of it (especially in warm weather). "

"If you disassemble the AirPort Extreme (voiding its warranty), you'll discover it has a very substantial heatsink under its white lid. Air enters through slots under the edges and exits through a groove near the top edge. The heatsink transfers heat from the chips near the center of the unit to this sluggish airflow at the edges, avoiding a terrible design mistake that led to widespread, heat-related AirPort Base Station failures in the 2001 model."

"[MacInTouch reader Constantin von Wentzel offers a peek inside the new AirPort Extreme in an extensive photo gallery ? see the links at the end of this review.]"

"The 802.11n AirPort Extreme uses a white external power supply with an ungrounded plug, like previous models, but shaped as a rounded rectangle in the same style as the base station. Since this brick is at middle of two cords, it won't consume extra spaces on a power strip like previous base station power supplies. The power cables are quite long ? 15 feet (4.5 m) from end to end ? giving plenty of length to position the base station wherever it might work best. "

"Apple boasts that the new AirPort Extreme is up to five times faster than the old model (and all other 802.11g base stations). This is due to the not-yet-final 802.11n specification (often called "pre-N" or "draft-N"), which allows broad spectrum operation in the 5 GHz frequency range to achieve more throughput. "

"In the United Kingdom, Apple only claims it is twice as fast, because the 5GHz range isn't available for private use in the UK. "

"The AirPort Extreme base station has three antennas inside. When running in 802.11n mode, all three are used to transmit and receive data on different frequencies at the same time. These separate transmissions are aggregated into a higher data rate and range than the older 802.11g can offer (and far more than the original 802.11b specification allowed)."

"And unlike 802.11g, the latest draft-N spec provides full compatibility modes for earlier WiFi protocols. In theory, the base station can talk to earlier b/g clients at their maximum supported speed while still talking to "n" clients at high speed."

"Alternatively, the base station can be put into 802.11n-only mode in the 2.4 GHz spectrum, where only 802.11n clients can use it, but any WiFi client can see the network's existence. "

"Switching, instead, to the 5 GHz spectrum makes the base station invisible to older 802.11b and g devices and also frees it from their demands on bandwidth. This will be welcome to anyone in a crowded WiFi space. (One of our offices is located in a busy mixed retail/commercial district with no fewer than seven wireless networks in range, many of them competing for the same radio space.)"

"The new 802.11n spec also supports up to twice the range of earlier WiFi networks. As always with radio technologies, however, your results may vary."

"The AirPort Extreme Base Station is no longer available in a Power Over Ethernet version, but third-party PoE "injectors" are available. (Apple tells us they've tested Microsemi's $59 PowerDsine PoE injector with AirPort Extreme.)"

"Some previous AirPort base stations include a USB port for wireless printer sharing among Mac and Windows clients. The new AirPort Extreme adds "

" sharing for the first time: plug in a USB hard drive (or a hub with several drives) and, Voilà!, instant network attached storage (NAS)."

"AirPort Disk (a.k.a. "AirDisk") supports Windows SMB file sharing, as well as Apple's own AFP file sharing, and configuration is flexible. Access can be granted via the base station's own password (granting access to all attached disks), or with passwords on a per-disk basis, or with standard user accounts set up with the new AirPort Utility application. "Guest" access can be enabled with read-only or read/write permissions (this is off by default)."

"The included, but optional, "AirPort Disk Utility" software watches for new AirPort Disks to appear on the network. As they become available, it automounts the disks if a password is available in the user's Keychain. (This can be disabled, and does not prevent mounting disks normally.)"

"The AirPort acts just like a Mac file server on the network. In Bonjour, it identifies itself using the base station's name. Confusion can ensue when first mounting an AirPort Disk, because the disk's name may be different from the AirPort's name. But this allows multiple disks to be shared and mounted, each with a distinct name."

"When user accounts are enabled, AirPort creates a standard Mac folder structure on the disk. A top-level folder called "Users" contains a separate home folder for each account. Another top-level folder called "Shared" is available to all users ? but is presented with the disk's name. (Perhaps this is to avoid multiple network volumes named "Shared" appearing on a user's desktop.)"

"The ability to have multiple, independent accounts is valuable. It might be nice to replicate accounts from Mac OS X Server, but anyone using Mac OS X Server probably doesn't need AirPort Disk."

"What file sharing protocols are available depends on how the disk was formatted prior to being plugged into the AirPort base station. If a disk is formatted with the Windows FAT scheme, it may only be shared via Windows SMB. (Macs can access SMB volumes, but there are some file name restrictions, and aliases may not always work reliably.) If a disk is formatted as an HFS+ drive (with or without journaling), it may be shared via Mac AFP and Windows SMB."

"AirPort Disk is a well-behaved AFP file server, politely terminating AFP connections when the base station restarts, but SMB connections abruptly terminate without notification. "

"Windows File Sharing is reasonably configurable; both workgroup and WINS server can be set manually. The presence of AirPort Disks can be advertised via Bonjour, and they can be shared over the Ethernet WAN port to the Internet, as well as over the local Ethernet LAN port and local wireless network."

"It isn't yet clear whether Apple's upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" release will be able to use AirPort Disk for Time Machine backups. Based on what limited information is available, we think it "

" be possible for a single user to do this, but AirPort Disk may not support multiple users for this purpose. We really have to wait for Leopard's release to know for sure, but most any backup utility should be able to save your files on virtual disk volumes you create on an AirPort Disk."

"AirPort Extreme now has more flexible access controls. "Timed Access" is a welcome new feature that finally offers control over when a specific computer (such as a child's iBook) is allowed access. Available pre-sets include each day of the week, weekdays, weekends, and every day. Any of these can be set to "all day" or "between" specific times. AirPort Utility's simple tool allows surprisingly complex access times to be set, such as 6am to 9pm weekdays and all day and night on weekends. "

"We found that a restricted PowerBook wasn't cut off at exactly the appointed minute, but within another few minutes, our AirPort menu bar went to zero signal and we were no longer connected to the network. Attempting to rejoin the network resulted in an error message instructing the user to see the administrator for access."

"Apple has combined its previous AirPort Admin and AirPort Setup Assistant applications into a single new AirPort Utility program. The clean new interface shows a list of available AirPort base stations; clicking one begins an "assistant" setup process that asks questions and configures the base station appropriately. "

"A Manual Setup mode is available as well, and a streamlined interface makes all the power of the previous AirPort Admin tools more easily available. Customizing DHCP ranges, configuring the base station for bridging, limiting client access, port forwarding, and monitoring DHCP and wireless client connections are all very easy. We hope this will be an example for other Apple configuration tools in the future. (System Preferences, we're looking at you.)"

"Apple advertises AirPort Extreme's built-in firewall as a key security feature. The firewall, though basic, is functional. In a quick network scan of the sort used to find targets for attack, the base station appears to be "down" (offline). A more sophisticated scan with the nmap tool shows it to be online but filtering. The only "open" ports nmap detected were ports we had specifically forwarded to a computer behind the network."

"The AirPort Utility has no way to configure or adjust this firewall. We'd like a way to enable access to AirPort Disk from only selected IP address ranges. A "stealth" firewall mode would be welcome too, to be completely invisible on the net."

"] to measure read/write performance to a Mac OS X Server volume and to AirPort Disk. (We have found that Kona provides consistent, repeatable results in benchmarking disk and network throughput.) We also tried a LinkSys WRT54GS wireless access point, without WEP or WPA encryption, as a baseline for comparison."

"Initially, we observed only moderate speed improvements over 802.11g hardware, with bursts of high throughput. We measured AirPort Extreme 802.11n at 3.4 to 4.4 MB/sec, while the LinkSys 802.11g base station provided 3.0 to 3.4 MB/sec. (We occasionally saw 802.11n bursts up to 7 MB/sec, but never sustained for more than a few seconds, even with the base station just a few feet from the Mac Pro.) We were extremely puzzled ? especially since MacInTouch readers were reporting considerably faster results than our own!"

"In a subsequent discussion with Apple, we learned that the LAN ports are known to be faster than the WAN ports. With this in mind, we tried a new network configuration."

"Our original configuration connected the AirPort base station via its WAN port to a larger, existing network that offered other services (including the file server and various routers to other networks). For the second series of tests, we reconfigured our networks, connecting the file server to one of the AirPort's three LAN ports."

"In the second configuration, we consistently saw read and write speeds of over 10 MB/sec, peaking at just over 86 Mbit/sec, from the file-server to wireless 802.11n AirPort clients! (For comparison, the best speed we've seen from the WRT54GS is about 27 Mbit/sec, which is typical for 802.11g. A ZDnet test of assorted non-Apple "Draft-N" hardware
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