Various experiences with the Airport Extreme

Is the AirPort Extreme worth the price?. I have used WAP from Netgear, Linksys, Dlink, Cisco and Apple. I used to set up the older UFO looking airport. So I tried the Airport Extreme when I was looking for a new WAP myself. It worked very well with a very strong signal. The problem was that I couldn’t justify spending that much money on it.

I had used the 2Wire AT&T DSL router for the last six years. That required regular rebooting and had issues when it rained. Instead of the AE i bought a $35 Netgear that works well. It is hard to tell exactly because I have a several year old Dell laptop which seems to lose the signal but it has problems with every wireless network. So I don’t suspect its the Netgear. I stream Netflix all day and for the most part it works well.

So should you get an AE? If money is no object sure. If you want performance then Cisco has a 450MB speed router that looks pretty impressive. I have also used WAP flashed with DD-WRT and those work ok as well. I didn’t find that the reliability was any better than the stock firmware. I would have bought better hardware than try to solve it with software. The older Airports with the UFO shape worked well. Out of the 3 that I bought only one had problems. However the power sometimes would brown out so I am not sure that I can blame the hardware itself.