Over the past couple of days I have been tweaking my home wireless network. I live in a big old farm house in Vermont and have various computers in various corners of the house (not to mention laptops, iPhones, Wii, etc…). I need Wi-Fi coverage in more areas than my AirPort Extreme Base Station can cover. But I also have a AirPort Express which can help extend the range of the network. Should be easy, right? Well, I discovered a few things that might help others and I thought I’d share.
The first thing I need to mention is I have the first generation AirPort Extreme (looks like a conehead) which is 802.11g. The AirPort Express is 802.11n and backwards compatible with 802.11g networks. Apple says to configure both the AirPort Extreme and the AirPort Express from the “AirPort Utility” which is on the CD included with the AirPort Express. So that’s what I did. I reset both devices to their default settings and created the network from square one. Setting up the AirPort Extreme was simple the AirPort Utility walks you right through the process and I had the base wireless network up and running in just a few minutes.
Then I configured the Airport Express to “Join my existing wireless network” and to “Extend the range of my wireless network sharing its internet connection”. I made sure I configured the AirPort Extreme and the AirPort Express to use “WPA/WPA2″ security and used the same password for both (this is important).
At this point the AirPort Utility gives me a big green check mark and lets me know the configuration was successful. I move the AirPort Express to an area which I think will best extend the wireless network to the rest of my house. Then weird things start happening.
As I am connecting computers to the network I see my network signal is very strong in some of the remote areas of my house but then when I connect to the network the signal drops significantly and in some cases I cannot access the internet. ”What the…?”
So I start searching the internet for “AirPort Extreme AirPort Express Extend”. I find links to Apple, a variety of on-line sales companies, and a few forums. As far as I can tell I am doing everything right. Then I come across a small footnote that says “AirPort Utility will only extend 802.11n wireless networks, with 802.11g use WDS to extend the network.” AirPort Utility does not have any settings for WDS, nor could I find anything for WDS in the AirPort utility. But I remember seeing a tab for WDS in the “AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow” my understanding was this utility was superseded by the “AirPort Utility” but I figured it was worth a shot.
Inside the ”AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow” I highlighted my Airport Extreme and clicked “Configure”. Then I clicked the “WDS” tab. Inside the WDS window I checked “Enable this base station as a WDS main base station”. Then next to the white window I clicked on the “+” and in the pop-up window I highlighted my AirPort Express to be a Remote Base Station. After the utility updated and restarted the base stations I now have strong internet everywhere I need it.
Next I’ll share my experience in finding a compatible wireless security protocol for all of my computers.
Stay tuned.
