Extending Your Wireless Network

I’ve written about this in brief before, but after actually setting up a wireless network using an Airport Extreme 802.11n and an Airport Express, I thought I would go into it with a little more detail.

I’ve been using the new 802.11n Airport for a couple months now and I absolutely love it. The new Airport Utility tool is great and makes setting up the Airport very simple.

For my setup I have a new Airport Extreme and a new Airport Express. I first wrote down any important configurations I had because I had to reset the Extreme to factory defaults. If you’re setting up your wireless network for the first time you obviously won’t need to reset the base stations because they’re already going to be at factory defaults. You will need to reset them if you’re attempting to add more Airports to your network though.

After resetting the Airport Extreme I set it up normally just as I did before. Make sure you select 802.11b/g compatibility. This is because the Airport Express doesn’t support the new 802.11n standard (yet…). Once you’ve setup your the Airport Extreme plug in the Airport Express. Use the Airport Utility to configure it. When you get to the step where it asks if you want to ‘create a new wireless network’ or ‘extend an existing network’, choose extend. On the next screen it’ll ask about which configuration you want to use, choose the one that talks about extending the network to share the internet connection, not the one that does AirTunes and printing, etc…You then get asked which base station is your main base station, choose the one we just previously configured and the Airport Utility will work it’s magic! You can keep doing this for as many Airports as you want to add to your wireless network.

Now I’ve extended my wireless network, and saved a lot of time by not having to run network cables all over the house!