As a reward for getting my new re-vamped Rectangle site online, for the freelance SEO Nottingham and online marketing services I offer, I decided to treat myself to a Airport Extreme router. I have been thinking about buying one for a while, and I have been getting really frustrated with slow wifi for the past few months.

My computer where I sit and do most of my work is quite a way from the router, so the range that the router offers was the main reason behind the purchase. I suppose it will be hard to judge how that goes until I have used it for a few weeks and up/downloaded some beefy files.. first impressions seem good though. The router allows you to use 802.11n wireless which is faster than most other routers which use 802.11g.

The installation and set up was fairly straight forward. I was surprised that I had to install the Airport Utility software which came on a cd, I thought that this would have been built into the OS and could have just been plugged straight in. Despite that though, it took about 2 minutes to run through and set up a new network and configure all of the passwords etc. During this process you can also set up a visitors network too, which allows you to give access to other users but restrict access to say shared drives or printers which may be available on your main network.

I’m going to plug in my printer in a mo, so fingers crossed that should just plug straight in and work. This was working on my old router so I’m not expecting any problems.

Overall I think it’s a good purchase. It was easy to set up, I’m getting good signal so far, and it looks quite cool too. One thing that is amazing is the lack of flashing lights.. nearly all routers I have used have lights that are constantly flickering when data is being transferred, if this is in your line of vision its normally really distracting.