It has been a while since I was completely anti-apple. During the nineties when the only machines I could use were the Power-PC mac clones in school I was supremely pissed with the quality of the product. The first introduction of the iMac and its bubble case with its ridiculous colors didn’t inspire any more confidence any me. However, after the third generation of the iPhone and multiple iterations of their pro series laptops I finally decided that the quality may have reached the level their cost. Since then I’ve gone through multiple iPhones with mixed feelings and three laptops. After using these products and my lack of success with different high end models of wireless routers I decided to try out the airport extreme.

I am not sure how I feel now about the design of the extreme. It is a rather large tower that can’t really be placed anywhere but on your desk. But it does look nice so sitting on your desk it doesn’t do anything but add aesthetic value. I’m not going to deny that I was a little pissed plugging it in initially that I couldn’t just log in with via the browser to do the setup on my main windows machine. I didn’t know I was supposed to download a AirPort Utility if I wanted to set it up on my main machine. So I had to get my work macbook so that I could do the initial setup.

For my initial setup I tried to just let the router determine the best settings. I had to spend quite a while power resetting my modem before it finally would work. After I finally got the utility installed on my windows machine I had to do a reset of the router to get most of the functionality to work.

Periodic Internet Outages

After I got everything setup I started experiencing some weird outages when I would hit certain websites. Not only would the internet stop working on my computer for the site in question but it would kill any streaming services I had for a few seconds to almost a minute. It took me quite a while to finally figure out what the problem was that was messing with what I wanted to be a great new device.

IPv6

The settings for my IPv6 had been defaulted to tunnel. Which I assumed was fine. But I finally fixed all of my issues when I switched the setting to Router. I wish there had been some clearer way to determine that it wasn’t my router or a bad router. But in the end everything smoothed itself out and the reason I bought the router has been functioning perfectly.

Streaming

I have gone through multiple modems of different makes and models most of which were not exactly cheap. But none of them seemed to have the two pieces of functionality that I wanted: range and speed between multiple devices. I’ve been using PS3 media server to stream high quality video from my main machine downstairs and across the house from my tv room. The last routers I had worked but would frequently puke when trying to stream some of the high action HD tv shows. I have yet to experience this with my new router and all the while I haven’t had any slow down when using multiple devices or hosting a home web server.

Conclusion

I would recommend this device to anyone looking for a better streaming experience in a spread out environment.