I get a fair amount (okay, about 5 hits a day) of traffic from people searching on the phrase "wifi repeater." They land on a brief entry I wrote a while back. Although the device I referenced in that entry was pretty cool (in theory, I never bought one), I think Apple just released the leader in this catagory. The Airport Express is a little device that plugs into the wall, acts as a wifi repeater/bridge, an access point, and does streaming audio to boot. It is, I should note 802.11g-only. I'm still stuck back in the land of 802.11b, and I'm not planning on upgrading in the near future (no real reason). But when I do upgrade, I'll probably want to pick up one of these gizmos to extend the signal to all parts of my long-and-narrow home.
Update: Kevin Jordan wrote to tell me that the Airport Express does support 802.11b. The specs say so. I should probably read a bit more carefully next time! Thanks, Kevin.
Another update: Boris Kraft wrote in to clarify. Turns out the Airport Express only acts as a repeater for other Airport products. From the spec: "AirPort Express can extend the range only of an AirPort Extreme or AirPort Express wireless network" (footnote 5). The bad news is that I really need to learn to read these things before shooting off at the mouth. The good news is that a) people do read this little weblog, and b) nice folks like Kevin and Boris kindly write in to correct me. If you'd like to correct me (on anything, really), shoot me an email at weblog@karlnelson.net.
Posted by Karl
June 8, 2004 08:03 PM