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Ask TUAW Video Edition: Extending your AirPort wireless

by Justin Esgar May 31st 2011 at 5:30AM

ask tuaw videoAhhh ... Tuesday -- what a glorious day, and a perfect day to talk about AirPort wireless setups. For this week's Ask TUAW video, here's a short piece on how to extend your wireless network. We're using an AirPort Extreme, but the steps are the same for the Express.

The video is in the second half of the post; as always, email us questions or leave 'em in the post.



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Ahhh ... Tuesday -- what a glorious day, and a perfect day to talk about AirPort wireless setups. For this week's Ask TUAW video, here's...
 

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Eric Krispin

When you do this don't you half the bandwidth every time you wirelessly repeat?

May 31 2011 at 7:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Eric Krispin's comment
Tom L

Hugues is right. "WDS" is the name for the old style of Airport networking. If you see only mention of that then you have an older (pre-Extreme) unit. I don't recommend trying to make one of those interoperate with an Extreme --- although the newer units claim to talk WDS, I learned the hard way that there are a number of bugs

May 31 2011 at 7:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Fourex

Could you tell me how you would handle mac address access control? I have all of my connections presently under access control. Do I need to duplicate the settings on the "repeater" router or just leave it alone?

May 31 2011 at 6:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter

Off-topic question: I'm trying to find a way to change my TUAW password. The AOL change-password scheme says I don't have an account, so I guess that the TUAW ones aren't merged.

I've looked and looked and found nothing else. Does anyone know how?

May 31 2011 at 5:25 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter

I have a setup similar to this but with one wrinkle. At the main base, I created a separate SSID for the 5GHz network so I can force my remote Airport Express (for streaming music) to connect on 5 GHz rather than 2.4GHz.

But you can only extend one network (i.e. one SSID) and then that name is used for both 2.4 and 5 GHz, undoing the separation.

So it looks as though I will have to wire the second base station instead of having it as an extender.

May 31 2011 at 5:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Juan

In my Airport Express wireless configuration I can only see Create a wireless network, Participate in a WDS network, and Join a wireless network. Seems like Extend a wireless network is not there, which one should I choose?

May 31 2011 at 10:40 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
3 replies to Juan's comment
raleedy

Why video? Why not text so we can take it in at our own pace and not have our time wasted?

May 31 2011 at 10:16 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Justin Esgar

Dave - the part about the limitations of users connected is true (express's can only have 10 wireless clients vs. 50 with the extreme/time capsule).

But the new Express's can do dual band 2.4 or 5Ghz.

Justin

May 31 2011 at 8:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Justin Esgar's comment
Hugues

Coming back to James question, the fact that the Extreme (and Time Capsule) is dual antenna, would that give some benefit in terms of data transfer rate between bases compared to an Express as secondary base station? The two Extremes would optimize the band usage i would think. Of course, that would mostly be beneficial for very heavy usage, but with Airplay and AppleTV streaming video and such, it is not that far fetched.

May 31 2011 at 9:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
James Harrington

Do you think there is any advantage to using an airport extreme/time capsule as a main base station and use airport expresses to extend the network?

I am thinking more from a small office perspective

May 31 2011 at 7:52 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to James Harrington's comment
Justin Esgar

James - that is actually the best way to do it and how the majority of people do it.
Advantage - you save money by not buying to Airport Extreme/Time Capsules.

The only reason I used 2 Extreme's in the video was because I don't have an Express handy to show.

Thanks
Justin

May 31 2011 at 7:56 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave Bullock

There are two obvious limitations I can think of - one is the number of clients the airport express will take compared to the airport extreme (I think the Airport Extreme and Time Capsule will take ~5x as many) and the other is that the Airport Extreme (and Time Cabsule I think) are dual antenna which allows them to support both 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks simultaneously while the Express is 2.4Ghz only.

May 31 2011 at 8:15 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dave

What if you want to extend it by having both networks having a wired connection? Is that the same?

May 31 2011 at 6:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Dave's comment
Justin Esgar

Dave - good question. If you have the ability to hard wire the 2nd base station you can use the same method and just have the 2nd base station connected via an ethernet.

Alternatively you can just setup the 2nd base station as if the first one doesn't exist and just use the same wireless name (SSID) and wireless password and type. (i.e. WPA Personal, etc). Have it setup to receive DHCP over ethernet, and just plug it in. The difference here is the first base station doesn't know about the second one, and won't be trying to communicate with it - so you won't have to worry about the second base station being within the range of the first base stations wireless coverage.

Hope this helps.
Justin

May 31 2011 at 7:51 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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