AirPort 802.11b

[thisbechuck]

I was wondering, since AirPort base stations are so damn expensive, can I just buy any other kind of 802.11b transmission station and have it work just as well?

[Steve Bosell]

I use a linksys wap 11, with the help of WEP key maker (find it at versiontracker), everything works great

[jeb1138]

Check out this thread:
http://www.macosx.com/forums/showthr...threadid=12527
for my shameless promotion of the Linksys Wireless Router over Apple's Airport Base Station.

I've looked into wireless base stations quite a bit and the Linksys Wireless Router (not just Access Point but Router with 4 100Mbit ports and, well, read that other thread) seems to me to be by far the best choice of anything out there.

In my apartment right now we have a 3 Windows 98 PCs and a Windows XP PC plugged in to the ethernet ports and an airport-equipped Powerbook G4 and airport-equipped PowerMac G4 connected wirelessly. The router is configured via a web browser, so there's no programs you need to run. Linksys doesn't officially support the router on a Mac, but I haven't had any compatibility problems. Just plug it in and there you go. 128-bit wireless encryption even works if you do it right. At around $180 the price is unbelievable for what you get compared to the other options out there. Airport cards are great but Airport Base Stations don't have near the functionality or power of one of these things (unless you need dial-up connectivity) and cost a whole lot more. On top of that the Linksys Router is just as easy to use. Be warned though: it ain't as pretty as the Airport Base Station.

[byronw70]

You can happily intermix Apple gear with any other 802.11b standard gear no worries with standard connectivity. I personally mix Cisco and apple gear.

Where you can run into trouble is with the WEP implementations. But as WEP is essentially pretty crap, if you are that fussed about encrypting your traffic, I would recommend running a totally independant VPN software over the top such as pptp something. Sorry I can't be more specific here. I don't worry about encryption at home and probably would use WEP if I needed some as I am not particularly paranoind about it there. However in my office windows enironment, I have setup a L2TP certificate based VPN system. I am not sure if you can get an l2tp client for MAC OS X.

Might have a look though.......