Mac Airport Express vs Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n)?

Question

I need a wireless router for my MacBook with an Airport Extreme Wireless card installed.

What's the difference between the Airport Express Router and the Airport Extreme Base Station (802.11n) Gig Ethernet? As a person using this at home with 1 Mac, which one would be best?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Airport Extreme supports 802.11n. Apple claims this to be 5 times faster in data transfer rate and offer 2 times better range. But your MacBook or other connecting device should support 802.11n. Extreme also has 3 additional LAN ports. You can use them when you are close to the base station to get a faster access. Extreme also has a unique feature called "AirPort Disk" which turns any external USB hard drive into a shared drive. So all your connected computers can backup or share with one huge hard drive connected wirelessly.

Airport Express too has some unique features. It is very compact and hence can be easily moved around with your laptop. It supports "AirTunes". AirTunes allows you to connect your Audio system to base station and hence listen your music through your Home Theatre.

I would recommend you to go with Express if your house if not very large and your are OK with speed of 10 Mbit/s. If you are only using your router to connect to Internet and your Internet speed is less than 10 Mbit/s, this should work for you. If you think you would use AirTunes, this is the only option.

But to be future proof, I would recommend you to go for Extreme. You never know when your Internet speed would go beyond 10 Mbit/s. Also it allows to have a shared External hard disk which would come in handy when you run out of space in your computers.

802.11n is definitely going to be the future wireless standard.