As an early adopter aka beta tester, I was rather keen on the whole idea of wifi. Sure it’s great when you’re out and about, need to do some web surfing get a few files, but it’s rather a pain in the backside when you live in a building with steel supports hidden in the walls, your computer is more than 4ft from your base station and want to download the latest Ubuntu Linux cd. Admittedly I have two Apple ‘Airport Express’ base stations which were the deal when they came out but their reception has much to be desired.
So today I received a rather cheap wired router (from Ebuyer) which took place of the Airport Express as the network router. Not only is this thing dirt cheap (~£15) but also has a print server and even some really suprising features like a Dynamic DNS client (but no setup for No-IP, just DynDNS, DTDNS and Sitelutions.com) and a java network traffic graph. It probably has a hell of a lot more, but I haven’t had much time to go through it. Mr Gibson’s ‘Shields Up‘ also reckons it’s pretty secure with only the ‘ping test’ failing.
Don’t expect a gorgeous control panel however, it’s pretty bleak but for £15 you can’t complain much. The plus side however is this:
and to think I was getting about 200kbps full speed on a 54Mbps wifi link before! Same line, just the router changed. In the Apple’s defence, it wasn’t specifically designed to be a heavy traffic router, but I reckon they should advertise this fact before making people shell out £90 for it. It does however do its other two functions rather well i.e. print serving and iTunes music streaming, the latter recently made better with iTunes 6.0.4 as it can now stream to multiple Airports at the same time so during parties you can set the whole house to your one playlist.
P.S. Download 3dMark06 to prove to you how slow your new computer is.