Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2008 > April > 30 > Entry
A (wireless) bridge to tomorrow: Airport Express
When we built our house, we spent some extra money having a home theater specialist run audio wire, coaxial cable and Ethernet lines throughout.
Some of it was money well spent: Having our rear speakers in the living room mounted overhead with no wires showing was great. Some of the other expense was a waste: We’ve never installed speakers on the back patio or upstairs because the A/V receiver in the living room cranks up music loud enough to be heard everywhere.
And in the era of cheap Wi-Fi, creating wired network connections in several rooms doesn’t seem like such a good use of money, either. In one way it’s helpful: Our cable modem is housed in a master bedroom closet and connects through the hard wiring to an Airport Extreme wireless router that’s far away upstairs.
But our installer accidentally installed a phone line connection in our living room instead of Ethernet and I never bothered to have him come back and correct that. So for the past four years, the only way my Xbox 360 or satellite TV set-top box could connect to the Internet was through a wireless bridge.
A wireless bridge connects to an installed Wi-Fi network, but has an Ethernet port that allows you to connect wired Internet devices. In the case of our satellite box, you can only access On Demand features through a high-speed Ethernet connection. Since there’s no Ethernet wall outlet nearby, a wireless bridge allows us to convert Wi-Fi to a wired connection without running more wires through the house.
I’d been using a very old wireless bridge, a D-Link Wireless-B bridge, circa 2002. The device was small, but ugly. It was slow and had annoyingly bright lights, but it got the job done. I could connect to Xbox Live and download TV shows via On Demand, even if the speeds weren’t spectacular.
Recently, the bridge stopped working. It had trouble connecting to the XBox network and wasn’t playing nice with our router. I got tired of disconnecting everything to diagnose weird network settings.
So the hunt was on for a faster bridge. Wireless-G bridges, especially for gaming, are plentiful. But I was holding out for something that could run at the newer Wireless-N standard because my router already broadcasts at that speed. Wireless-N bridges are just starting to appear in the marketplace and some cost as much as $100 or more.
The Express also recently was revamped to run at Wireless-N speeds. For $99 on Amazon, I had my device.
The setup wasn’t Apple-intuitive, but it did take less than an hour. I had to tell both the Extreme router and the Express bridge how to communicate with each other (it involved configuring an obscure protocol called “WDS” in the setup software). But once I got the green light from the Express, I was able to go online with the Xbox and the DirecTV box. Connections were speedier and both my laptop and desktop recognized the new iTunes speaker.
Combining iTunes streaming with the iPhone software “Signal,” I had an iTunes remote control that could change tracks from anywhere in the house (or outside of it).
For some people, this kind of setup might be overkill. It might be cheaper and less time-consuming to run a cable to the living room or have an installer come do it for you.
But I’ve found the Express to be a nice little Wi-Fi marvel, and streaming iTunes music (including copy-protected songs purchased from the iTunes store) is a welcome bonus.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment Categories: Gadgets, Internet, TV
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By Omar Gallaga
April 30, 2008 10:38 AM | Link to this
The Express should be able to extend your wireless network, repeating the signal from the Extreme, or work as a bridge if you just need an Ethernet port like I did. My Extreme covers my whole house, and all my wireless devices pick up that signal strongly, but I was stuck when it came to my wired-only Ethernet devices.
There are plenty of online help docs on Apple's support site as well as plentiful info on lots of Apple forums on how to do it. I'm not a big fan of the Airport software, which I think could be a lot more user-friendly, but there should be a way to do it.
By Brenda Thompson
April 30, 2008 9:40 AM | Link to this
I'm glad to see this, as I recently purchased the new Express to go along with my Airport Extreme, to get a better signal upstairs in my house. My all-Mac installer guy (who used to work at the Apple store) could not make it work. I'm sending him your article and asking him to try again.