Linksys Wireless-G router and new powerbook

larry98765

larry98765

Registered
I'm planning on getting a 12" Powerbook with Airport extreme built in some time in the future. In the meantime, I need a router for my desktop G4 and my home-brewed PC, and thought I'd buy one that will grow with my needs.

I'm considering the Linksys over Airport because it's got a 4-port hub built in and it's $100 cheaper. (The new WRT54G is equipped for the new G standard, as well as B, as is the new Airport.)

I've heard good things about Linksys, and have read that there's no incompatibility problems with mac.

That said, I have a few questions I wanted to toss to the forum:

1) Is that so? Are there any compatibility problems?

2) Why DOESN'T Linksys say they support mac if they work just fine?

3) Is a router that's managed through a web browser a much bigger hassle than the plug-n-play of an Airport? I've never used either, so I'm wondering what user experiences have been.

In all, is there anything I should know before buying a Linksys wireless router as opposed to Airport.

Many thanks.
 
1) I heard somewhere (on this forum?) that the 802.11g spec wasn't totally finalized yet and that Linksys was promising firmware upgrades to make everything fully compliant when the spec was out. If so, there could be problems with interfacing with Airport Extreme for now. But maybe that's old news.

2) LinkSys has never "supported" Macs but their products have always worked perfectly for me. I've used their 802.11b router/AP/switch for over a year now and their router/switch before that and never had any compatiblity problems.

3) The web-based configuration works great in my opinion. I've never used Airport Admin so I can't compare the two, but it was a one-step process for me: 1. Plug the cables into the router. 2. No step two! ;) The airport card in my Powerbook picked up the signal and connected automatically, and the router talked to the cable modem and connected automatically. I also like the cusomizability of the Linksys. Looking at the screenshots of the Airport Admin utility on Apple's website, it looked like there were a whole lot less options. So for me Linksys worked better -- if I wanted easy setup it couldn't get easier, and if I wanted lots of options I could change them (and did).

The LinkSys price point was the real killer though. With more features and a 4-port 10/100 switch that the Airport Base Station didn't have and less than half the price, it couldn't be beat. I don't know if this will repeat with the 802.11g products though. Maybe Apple's price will be more competitive. Maybe Apple's mistake was making their computers too good -- they work so flawlessly with 3rd party products that we don't need their base station! ;)
 
Thanks for your thoughts, jeb.

Re the price point, I belive it's still a bargain. I saw the WRT54G listed for $135.

Only one more feature that Airport Extreme has that I don't know if other wireless routers have:

From Apple's site on the Airport Extreme page:

"6. Lets you phone home ? literally
The PPP dial-in feature in AirPort Extreme lets you make one very important wireless connection ? to your own Macintosh at home. Thanks to connectivity options such as DSL, cable and Ethernet, you can call the 56K V.90 modem-equipped AirPort Extreme Base Station at home when you?re at work or traveling. Need a document that?s on your Mac desktop at home? Not to worry. If your Mac is on, ready to share files, and connected to the Internet using the AirPort Extreme Base Station and a broadband connection, you can access it as well as the other computers ? from almost anywhere in the world."

Where can I find specifics about this process? Why would I dial in if I'm accessing it using broadband? Is that just so I can get the ip address if I don't have a static IP? Or is it to wake the machine and let it know I'll be logging in?
 
Don't forget, Apple's base station has a USB port to allow network printing and also an external antenna connector. I don't think the Linksys has either of these features. Plus going by reviews I've read around the net Apple's has much better signal strength and range than any of the other popular consumer models.
 
Here's how I think the dial-in thing works: Say you're away from home somewhere, you don't have broadband or dial-up access, and you want to get a file off of your home desktop computer. If you have your phone line plugged into your Airport Basestation and have turned your answering machine off you can call your home phone number and the Airport Basestation will answer. Then it will connect you to your desktop computer and you can get that file you desperately need.

The description on Apple's page is really vague and I'm not sure if you become a full-fledged member of the network (in which case you should be able to access the internet and any computer connected to your home network) or if you get a connection to a single prespecified computer. Sounds interesting though, if anyone has any more info I'd love to hear about it. You have to remember, however, that you will have to call long distance to do this if you're out of your local calling area. I haven't heard of any routers out there that automate this task, but they may exist. The Linksys definitely doesn't have it.

g3joel -- where did you read about the Airport's range being so much better? I've never heard it mentioned as anything spectacular. We used one at work and it didn't seem that impressive. The USB print server is a nice feature, but I would (and did!) go with Linksys' wireless print server (http://linksys.com/products/product.asp?grid=33&scid=37&prid=440). You can get both the print server and the Wireless AP Router for the same price as an Airport Extreme Base Station and then you only have to pay for it if you want it, and you get a 4-port 10/100 switch built-in too. You can also then put the printer anywhere within range of the basestation, instead of having to put it within USB range of the base station, because it connects wirelessly to the network. It's worked great for me.

The linksys antennas are removable and you can extend the range. Linksys even sells a range extender.

I think the new Airport Extreme is a lot more competitively priced than the old Airport Basestation but it still seems pretty pricey.

Oh yeah, I checked and the final 802.11g spec isn't out yet. Both Apple and Linksys say their products adhere to the "802.11g Draft Specification" so I believe they should work but am not sure.
 
Hi jeb, thanks for that info re. the wireless printing with a USB printer. It sounds like a really nifty idea. The only reason I was planning on getting an Apple Airport myself was because of the USB port for wireless printing, none of the other routers I had looked at actually had this capability. With regards to the range I am going by something I read on either PracticallyNetworked.com or 80211-planet.com, but more specifically this review on ZDNet which said it outperformed both the LinkSys Etherfast and the Proxim Skyline. Btw PracticallyNetworked.com mentions the Proxim Skyline as having *the best* wireless performance compared to anything. I'd take this with a pinch of salt though as the review could be old.

P.S: Actually now that I've looked at it, the information about the LinkSys wirless print server doesn't say anything about a USB port, only a parallel port :(

P.P.S: Nevermind, I found their USB version :D
 
Jeb: Yes. Apple is *very* vague. In any case, dialing directly into your mac at home home has always been available as long as one had a modem. So I'm curious how this differs.
 
Originally posted by larry98765
Jeb: Yes. Apple is *very* vague. In any case, dialing directly into your mac at home home has always been available as long as one had a modem. So I'm curious how this differs.
Click to expand...

Right, but potentially this could give you free dial-up internet access away from home (as long as you were within the local area code) without having to configure any computer, depend on it, or even leave it on, by linking you to your broadband connection very straighforwardly.

Also, it could make you a full-fledged member of the entire network, allowing you to really virtually be at home instead of having to work with only one computer. I assume the old dial-in options didn't provide such connectivity options, right? In any case, this would be much more straightforward, dependable and easy to configure than any method of dialing into a single computer.

I wouldn't have any use for this feature, as the other 12 computers on our apartment network (well, 4-apartment network if you count the 3 people connecting wirelessly downstairs and across the hall and the next door neighbors we drilled a hole to :D) don't have any of my data, and I generally have broadband access on campus so I can just forward ports on the Linksys to whichever computer has the service I want. But still, it sounds pretty cool technically and I'm sure it would be useful for some people. Are you one of those people? I'd be interested to know how you would or have used it.
 
Originally posted by jeb1138
Right, but potentially this could give you free dial-up internet access away from home (as long as you were within the local area code) without having to configure any computer, depend on it, or even leave it on, by linking you to your broadband connection very straighforwardly.
Click to expand...

Aha. I never thought of it that way. :) And since the Airport is doing all the routing, I could do this even if my computer weren't on? i.e. just dial in to the airport and connect to the dsl connection that way?

Does anyone know where Apple spells all this out? Where can I find detailed info on everything that's possible with an Airport extreme?

And yes. To answer your question, I want to be able to have maximum access to my network (a mac and pc) from anywhere I happen to be. If that means dialing in, great. Even better, If I have a high speed connection on the road somewhere, then I'd want to connect over TCP/IP.

Timbuktu might be worth the investment, but I'm not sure it'd be necessary.
 
Originally posted by jeb1138
.... But still, it sounds pretty cool technically and I'm sure it would be useful for some people. Are you one of those people? I'd be interested to know how you would or have used it.
Click to expand...

I am one of those people. Right now, I use a WindowsXP machine with a modem hanging off it to be my dial-up point, but I may seriously have to think about A.E. if it can do this as seamlessly as it sounds.

I use my dialup just as it's been discussed here - access to the internet via dialup while I'm away from home, essentially becoming my own ISP. But with a twist. I do it wirelessly.

The back-story: I work for a large financial institution as an SA for a number of middleware services - app servers, LDAP, web services, etc. From an IT perspective, most financial institutions tend to be quite conservative when it comes to access to the outside world. And there's some regulatory issues too, regarding "unofficial communications channels". Long story-short, no webmail, no irc, no msnmessenger, no web-chat, no streaming quicktime (no keynote addresses), etc.. Oddly, getting to the forums here and other places are not generally an issue, but I'm not complaining... :)

So, I wanted a way to do what I call "out-of-band" access to my personal email accounts during the day. What I do is use my Palm (Tungsten-T now, but any of them would work) and my T68i to dial back to the house and use Versamail to pick up my messages from my email servers. This, incidently, gives me full internet access, so I can surf the web, do irc, etc over the wireless.

The only downside is that it's slow (9.6Kbps). I'm on Cingular (GSM), and have not yet been able to get the GPRS data-access to work with my Palm, even though the WAP-browser on the phone works fine over GPRS. Even if I had got it working, GPRS in this part of the world tends to be very expensive, and billed by data-rate, not time (US$6.99 for 1MB + US$0.03/KB overage), so I'm not sure that I'd want to use it for general data access anyway. With dial-up, I only pay for airtime, which, in contrast to GPRS, is dirt-cheap these days.

Of course, being my own ISP (for dialup) also lets me take my iBook with me to, say, my mom's house, tie up her phoneline and surf, while still earning the 'good son' points for visiting mom. ;)

This post ran rather longer that I'd intended, but the point is, if I can remove that dependency on the lone Windows machine at the house, I'm one step closer to Windowless-nirvana.
 
Linksys is a good company. I just bought an 802.11b Router/Hub, two USB Wireless Adapters and a Wireless PC Card to get our Cable connection to all our computers. It worked great. The Macs didn't need any software drivers, the PC's on the other hand required drivers out the wazoo (Even XP) but we got em all connected and we're happy. Cable for all!
 
Thanks for the info kenny. Having interned at a government institution with all kinds of firewalled restrictions, your post makes a lot of sense to me. It would have been nice to be able to phone home on my laptop and get a real connection every once in a while! Well, I guess it would have if I had had an extra phoneline at home, if I had been allowed to actually bring my laptop in and if we didn't have ISDN phones. :( Oh well, I can see how it would be nice for many people though.

Somebody please phone up Apple Sales and ask them what this dial-in feature really does! I'm too lazy but I want to know! :D

Jasoco -- did the Linksys USB adapters work on your Mac's without drivers?? I would be really surprised (and happy)!

Yes! Cable for all! :D
 
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