Bye bye Airport

My Apple Airport started acting up yesterday (maybe if suffers from a Y2K4 bug? ). Whenever I tried to push or pull large files across the wireless connection, it would work for a while and then drop the connection. After a couple seconds it would reestablish but some software didn’t tolerate this very well. I’ve been using the Airport with a few different laptops and wireless cards and had never seen it do this before. It wasn’t restricted to files going through the Internet or a VPN connection. The same thing would happen if I copied files to a wired computer on the same network.

I’m not a hardware geek but I tried to narrow down what was causing the problem: I tried two other wireless cards, I reset the Airport, switched to a different wireless channel, etc. Nothing fixed the problem. When I hooked my laptop directly up to my router, the problem went away. All signs pointed to the Airport.

I decided that the easiest solution would be to buy a replacement. My Airport is 3-1/2 years old and I could replace it for substantially less than it cost in 2000. It’s amazing how much the home networking market has changed since then. 802.11b is still prevalent but there are other options. I ended up buying a 802.11g wired/wireless router at Staples. I don’t have a 802.11g card yet but it works fine with 802.11b cards — and I can eventually go for more bandwidth with 802.11g when I need it. With a store rebate it was actually cheaper than some of the 802.11b routers.

The Airport is too cool to throw away. I guess I’ll put it up on the shelf as technological “artwork”.

Update: The new router had a different default channel setting. I was getting good signal strength but poor “link” quality. Probably interference from some other 2.4 Ghz signal. I switched to the channel I was using with the Airport and I’m getting better link quality than I did with the Airport.

Update 2: Miguel tells me that my Airport issues could be related to the power-supply problems reported for the graphite Airports. Here’s a link that explains how to fix it or get it repaired. Unless I did the work myself, the new router is cheaper than fixing the Airport — and it supports 802.11g as well.