Product Reviews

There's no doubting Apple's style, so it's no surprise that its AirPort Extreme looks good. The Mac mini-sized box looks gorgeous and wouldn't look out of place on a desk. Compared to the usual ugly boxes with protruding aerials that we're used to seeing, the AirPort Extreme is a work of art.

Apple has tried to keep things simple, so the router is configured entirely through the AirPort express utility. This scans for unconfigured routers and runs you through a wizard to help configure it. The wizard is thorough and prompts you to change the network name, turn on security and configure your internet connection.

Strangely, once the router has been configured there's no web-based interface to manage advanced settings; instead, you still have to use the utility. It's quite an annoying application to use. Making a change and applying it reboots the router and shuts down the utility's configuration page. If you want to make a change to another setting, you have to open the configuration page again.

Configuration of advanced options isn't always as easy as it

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should be. For example, Apple has a predefined list of common services for configuring port forwarding, but the odd naming scheme makes it harder to use than it should be. Instead of having a service called Web, Apple has called it 'personal web sharing'. Bizarrely, there are no settings for the AirPort's firewall, so you can't configure this security manually.

Apple doesn't support UPnP, opting for NAT-PNP instead, which offers a similar set of features. While this is widely supported by Apple products and in Windows via Bonjour (www.apple.com/support/downloads/bonjourforwindows.html), other peripherals such as music players and video-streaming devices don't support it. We're not entirely surprised by this, as Apple often chooses to implement different standards.

We are, however, surprised by the lack of network adaptors. The AirPort Extreme is a Draft 802.11n router, so it works best with matching network adaptors. Apple, however, supplies only adaptors built into its newer notebooks, so there's no way to get the best out of this router using a PC. Even so, it performed well when we tested it with our Centrino notebook. It has good range, too, with a throughput of 6.34Mbit/s at 20m. Using a Mac, though, it achieved the fastest throughput we've seen, 59.64Mbit/s.

If you have primarily new Macs, the AirPort Extreme is an excellent router. For anyone with mixed environments or primarily PCs, Apple's AirPort Extreme is too expensive and not flexible enough. Netgear's RangeMax Next Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router is far better value and more flexible.