So, back in March, I wrote a little article about how the announcement that most excited me from the last MacWorld Expo was the new Airport Extreme base station. At the time, I was using a Belkin 54G wifi router and a Linksys wifi router that came with my T-Mobile @ home package. I knew that I wanted this little gem, but things were working well, so there really wasn’t a need to upgrade. Then I wanted a VPN.

I purchased an application for the Mac called iVPN (which is a great program) that for about $25, will run a full fledged VPN server on any Mac using Mac OS 10.5. Fabulous! So, get it installed, try to connect from the road… nothing. Okay, the Linksys router claims VPN passthrough when you check the correct box. I did. Nothing. Talk about frustrating.

This, I reasoned, was the time to take the plunge, but $175 for a router? Well, considering the number of routers I’ve owned over the years and chucked for one reason or another, maybe paying this rather large sum would be worth it. So, keeping my fingers crossed, I headed to my local Best Buy and picked it up.

Installation and setup was a breeze. I now have two separate wifi networks in my house: one that is specifically for my AppleTV and the other, for all my other wifi devices. Not only does it seem to work flawlessly, it even makes my network seem like it’s running faster (not a scientific study, mind you!).

My favorite feature, though, is the USB port on this bad boy. I have a Airport Express in our house that has a USB port, but it is only for connecting a printer so you can have a wireless print server in your home/office. With the Airport Extreme, you can actually connect a router to the USB port and connect MULTIPLE devices to it. In my home office, I have a USB printer and 2 hard drives connected to it. One drive for general storage, the other as a Time Machine backup. Since the Airport Extreme has gigabit ethernet, my Desktop Mac, which is wired to the router, accesses the drives as fast as if they were locally connected. My only complaint, which isn’t the Airport Extreme’s fault, is that Time Machine is a bit slower on a network drive than a local one.

Need to access the drive from across the internet? Not a problem, as long as you know the IP address of your home network. In the preferences in your Airport Utility, select to share your drive over the WAN and it’s that simple (I recommend using a VERY secure password when doing this).

I have recommended the Airport Extreme base station to quite a few of my clients already. I think Apple has a real winner with this product and wish they would advertise it at least a little bit. The setup in Windows is easy as well! I say if you need a new router, pick one of these up today… you’ll be glad you did!

(Oh, and my VPN works great now!)