Existing users, 
It is interesting reading scripts written by various bozos, academic or other non income earning or generating individuals below that state that the Base Station is not needed. The Base Station is a brilliant business product. We roll out Base Stations to a variety of MSWindows customers all with a variety of WiFi cards with wonderful success. Connect a Base Station to an ADSL unit, setup PPPoE and you can have a whole room of pc's online in seconds (assuming the pcs are all operational - an income earning issue in itself!!). Management concerns are virtually zero setup aside and the cost per pc is a lot lower than a whole pile of wires, switches and a firewall. Brilliant product. I visit my clients monthly for entertainment and consultancy phone calls all relate to expansion ideas. Non wireless connected pc's are thrown on the ethernet interface and DHCP does the rest. We attempt(!) to limit the number of clients per base station to 10 because printing can be problematic but... Printing per room is great although queue managment could be better and the ability to print to a number of usb (and ethernet/unix) printers (per room) would be useful.
The only thing that is missing is the ability to have a small networkable common disk drive internal to the base station to turn it into a common shareable (smb and afp) server. 100Gb max. Everything else is there.
Don't slam such a good product and encourage other businesses to use them in Windows environments... we have to help those poor Luddites.
Apple Time Capsule & AirPort Base Station
Firmware for all 802.11n base stations.
Version: 7.4.2
Airport Base Station
Feedback Type: Review
Contributed by: Phoenix DownUnder Tuesday, January 27 2004 @ 02:19 AM PST
Product Platform: MacOSX
Used Product For: Over One Year
Recommend Product: YES
Overall Rating:
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Comments
Airport Base Station - Xapplimatic
My post was designed to get the attention of the target audience (people who can and want to save money on their setup). I am referring generally to home networking and small business setups where there is one computer that can be left on to service the network. I don't think that Enterprise class businesses go looking for networking advice in version tracker software update listings anyways. ;) Furthermore, I have nothing against Apple's products or the base station itself, but it is honestly not necessary in all situations and why not save the money if you can? If getting people's attention and telling them how they can save money qualifies as a "rant", then so be it. I ranted.. and I'll keep ranting! :PSoftware sharing doesn't require purchasing extra computers or extra cables.. just leave the software base station Mac on during the hours you need the network and it does all the work (Panther only). No need to get your nickers in a twist... geesh. Home networking is the fastest growing market segment by the way, so the comment was more relevant than not and I think people on a realistic budget without extra ca$h to throw away will find the information more helpful than not. Heck, it doesn't even require routing an extra Ethernet cord, USB cord, or AC adaptor cable, not even turning a screw driver!
The only real downsides to software sharing are
1. If you can't leave a net-connected computer powered on 24/7 or during the hours you expect to need Wi-Fi service.
2. If no computers can be conveniently located next to the broadband modem or phone line. Most cable modem installers will bring the cable to the computer if they aren't nearby neighbors already. Since most homes already have multiple phone jacks, most DSL users probably already have a phone jack near their computer, so that's not an issue for them either.
3. If your network attached computer has to be a PC, then it will be significantly more difficult to setup software sharing because you will have to get 3rd party software more than likely to do the job. Anyone who has done this on a PC so that Macs can connect wirelessly without issues, I would like to know the name of the software used.
4. If your internet-connected computer is located in a place not central between all the areas where WiFi needs to be present, and can't be relocated, you may have signal strength issues that are easier to solve with an external antenna which in most cases will require an Airport Extreme Base Station, or a 3rd party vendor external antenna kit (like for G5s and PowerBooks).
Monday, April 19 2004 @ 03:49 PM PDT
Non-income earning Luddites? - it's only me
uh, I guess one insult is due another.How's this for an income earning proposition:
Your job is about as valuable as a lead weight on a sinking ship.
Since you are overpaid (left over from the days when you actually had some value), replacing you with cheaper labor is the easiest way to make more capital. There are (literally) millions of people out there who could fill your shoes for a lot less (or maybe you are planning to move to India?) Perhaps you shouldn't put yourself in such an exalted position. That position is a tenuous one at best.
:)
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Tuesday, January 27 2004 @ 12:29 PM PST