If you are an iPhone user looking to add or upgrade Wi-Fi in your home or office, Apple released two new products this week that will be of interest to you. First, Apple updated its AirPort Extreme base station, a Wi-Fi router that you attach to your broadband cable or DSL modem to create a wireless network throughout your home or office. Before talking about what is new, let me start by discussing the prior version of this product.
The prior version of the AirPort Extreme offered two types of bands. First, there was the slower 2.4 GHz band. This band can be used with the older Wi-Fi standards of 802.11b or 802.11g. The iPhone, for example, uses 802.11g. However, on the 2.4 GHz band, you can get interference from cordless phones, microwave ovens, nearby industrial sites or wireless cameras. Second, there was the faster 5 GHz band. The newer 802.11n can use this band, and 802.11n on 5 Ghz can be five times or more faster than 802.11g on 2.4 GHz. With the older AirPort Extreme (which is what I use for Wi-Fi at my house), you had to choose either the 2.4 GHz band or the 5 GHz band. For anyone with an iPhone, this is no choice at all because the iPhone can only use 802.11g, which only works on 2.4 GHz. Thus, even though I have other devices in my house that can take advantage of 802.11n and 5 GHz (specifically, other Apple computers and an Apple TV), I need to keep my AirPort Extreme in 2.4 GHz mode to maintain computability with both my iPhone and the Dell laptop provided to me by my law firm which only has 802.11g.
With the new version of the AirPort Extreme, you no longer need to choose because the new AirPort Extreme allows simultaneous dual-band support. It does this by including two radios in the unit, one which provides a 2.4 GHz network that your iPhone and older computers can use, and one which provides a 5 GHz band network that your new computers and other devices such as an Apple TV can use. The new AirPort Extreme also includes other new features, such as a guest networking feature that allows guests to use your Wi-Fi for the Internet but not have access to devices on your network such as hard drives, printers, etc. The new AirPort Extreme costs $179.00, the same price as the prior version.
The second item that Apple updated this week is called the Time Capsule. The Time Capsule is nothing more than an AirPort Extreme that also includes an internal hard drive (either 500 GB or 1 terabyte) which you can use to automatically backup your Apple computers using software that comes with every Mac called Time Machine. The new version of the Time Capsule adds simultaneous dual-band support. The price remains the same: $299.00 for 500 GB or $499.00 for 1 TB.
The updates to the AirPort Extreme and the Time Capsule are great for people who own an iPhone, and frankly I'm a little envious. I would love to have both 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi network for my iPhone and Dell laptop and simultaneously have the faster 5 GHz network for my Macs and my Apple TV. I recently switched from using DSL to a cable modem at my house because with DSL I was only getting speeds of around 4 Mbps whereas with a cable modem I now see speeds at my house of up to 20 Mbps -- downloads now just zip, and I can use products like Citrix to access my work environment on my home computer at top speed. But I can only get that top speed on the iMac in my study that I have connected via Ethernet cable to my AirPort Extreme. The other computers and the Apple TV in my house use 802.11g Wi-Fi and don't see much additional speed beyond what I was getting with DSL.
If you want to learn more about Apple's new AirPort Extreme and what it means for your home or office network, I have two words for you: Glenn Fleishman. Fleishman, who runs the respected Wi-Fi Networking News site, is perhaps the preeminent expert on all things Wi-Fi. Earlier this week, he posted a nice overview of the new features on the TidBITS website, followed by an expanded analysis on the Macworld website. And if you want to learn more about Wi-Fi on Apple products, there is no better source than Fleishman's Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, an e-book that you can download in PDF format instantly for only $15 and which covers everything that you might want to know in a very easy to read format. It's really a great book that taught me a lot and which I use as a resource whenever I want to do anything involving Wi-Fi.
