The Apple Airport Extreme Base Station is a high performance wireless simultaneous dual band gigabit router for streaming HD media and gaming. How do you compare with the new Linksys E4200 router?

High Speeds

New high performance wireless routers are introduced using the latest wireless N750 technology including Linksys E4200, Netgear WNDR4000 and Belkin N750 DB. The wireless N750 routers deliver the high speeds up to 450Mbps in 5GHz band and up to 300Mbps in 2.4GHz band, both bands work simultaneously. For Mac users, it’s likely the Apple Airport Extreme Base Station would be the first choice when they decide to purchase a wireless router for their high performance wireless network in home.

Apple airport extreme is powered by the latest 802.11n technology with dual band simultaneous support where each band delivers the speeds up to 300Mbps (aka N600 router). Regarding the speeds specification, Linksys E4200 is faster than Extreme Airport. But in the real world, you never reach the wireless speeds they specify.

Ethernet Ports

Both Apple Extreme and Linksys E4200 are equipped with the gigabit Ethernet ports, but the number of LAN ports is different. E4200 includes four but Apple Extreme includes 3 gigabit Ethernet ports. In home usages, the users mostly connect to the network wirelessly. Only one or two computers connect to the router using wired LAN cable.

Both routers include one gigabit WAN port you need to connect to the modem. Modem with gigabit Ethernet port (such as Docsis 3 SBG6120 cable modem) would be much advantageous for maximum data rate transfer between the modem and the router. But your modem and router will not improve the performance of your internet connectivity experiences. Upgrade your broadband internet service plan with higher bandwidth for better performance.

USB Port

Both routers include one USB port. USB port in Apple Airport is used either as shared external USB disk storage or shared printer. Even you can add a USB hub and you can attach both printer and storage concurrently for share across the network. But Linksys E4200 cannot be used to host a shared printer but shared storage.

Linksys includes Cisco Connect software to let you manage the available shared printer easily. The software can help you manage other settings including the security settings, shared storage and so on.

If the requirement of sharing the storage and printer at the same time, you can consider Asus RT-N56U which includes two USB ports for shared storage and printer at the same time. This is good so you don’t need to purchase separate print-server for shared printer.

Click here for Apple Airport extreme spec details.

In Amazon, Apple airport extreme receives very positive reviews from the customers. Averagely 4.4 stars out of five customer ratings for ease of use, ease of installation, range and extensibility. Surprisingly for Linksys E4200 besides receives averagely 4.3 stars customer ratings for ease of use and ease of installation, the Linksys E4200 receives averagely 3 stars for unreliable.

The following figure shows networking diagram with Apple Airport extreme as the center of the network. With storage attached to the router, you can stream the media from the storage to the HDTV using Apple TV or Roku.

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