Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Why I Don't Want an Airport Extreme Base Station

I was considering replacing my Netgear wireless router with something that would work better with our remote Airport Express units -- that is, something that would allow them to put remote computers onto the same network using WAP. The Netgear router will not do this, at least not without a lot of pain.

An Airport Extreme base station would do it, but after some reading, I have ruled out buying one. Why? Because it will not allow me to set the MAC (hardware Ethernet) address.

This features has existed in the last two Netgear routers I've owned, and it is extremely valuable. Our ISP requires that you specify a fixed MAC address. Dealing with Comcast customer service on the phone is not exactly my favorite activity, so it is far easier to reuse the old hardware address when changing hardware.

I think there may be a software solution for this but it looked pretty ugly. There may be a valid security reason for Apple not to want to provide this feature, but they lose out in usability. So no Airport Extreme base station for me!

No comments: