Apple Airport Vs. Orinoco RG-1000?

Ted Pham asks: "I want to purchase an 802.11b wireless base station for my house. My top two candidates are the Apple Airport and the Orinoco RG-1000, and I have a few questions about how these products compare." Anyone care to give comments on any experiences they have had with these pieces of hardware. Read on for more specifics.

Ted's Questions:

1. How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)
2. I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?
3. The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?
4. Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?

Comments

I use an AirPort.

[Lazaru5]

1.How does the coverage of the two compare? Are the wireless transmitters essentially the same? (Both seem to use Orinoco Silver cards, though the RG-1000's card isn't removable.)

Yes, they are essentially the same. As you alluded to, you can replace the Silver card in the AirPort with a Gold for 128bit encryption. (As a hack previously mentioned on Slashdot, not supported by Apple.) With Line-of-Sight I get probably close to the 300 feet mark. I got much less when cutting a corner down the hall in my apartment building, but you're talking 10 walls and 5 apartment's worth of radio interference. I walked around the parking lot with no problems.

2.I've seen the stories about extending coverage by hooking an external antenna to the Apple Airports. Can an external antenna be attached to the RG-1000? If so, with or without hacking?

The AirPort antenna hack used an Orinoco antenna, so I sould assume the antenna's intended use is for with other Orinoco products. Check to be sure.

3.The Orinoco FAQ says that about 30 clients can be supported by a single RG-1000. Apple's specs suggests 10 clients max. Has anyone used more then 10 clients with an Apple Airport and if so how well did it work?

Who knows if this is a licensing thing or what. I would assume you can support whatever 802.11b under these cards support, but if it's limited by the software then I can't say. I only have one wireless device myself. If it's a problem, buy three AirPorts. :) You'd pay the same price and could extend the coverage using what Apple calls Roaming (each base station must be wired to the ethernet though.)

4.Both products can do NAT. Can you configure filters or open up ports with the utilities provided with either?

The AirPort does provide port mapping (redirecting ports on the external public IP to internal machines) but does not do packet filtering. It does have access control but this is for controlling which wireless devices may use the network (Using MAC addresses.) You should be doing packet filtering on your router (You run OpenBSD right? :) anyway.

Now for my own notes. I got an AirPort because my wife got an iBook for college (Those biologists tend to use Macs so she wanted to be compatible.) It's easier to get our LAN into her office using wireless than it is for me to string CAT5 up all over (It's an apartment so I can't go through the walls.) I also intend to get my own laptop soon and working (I work at home) from the balcony just sounds sweet.

At the time, the only way to configure the AirPort base station was to use Apple's configurator. At the heart of it though, it's just an SNMP device, and so of course someone has written a Java configurator that'll let you config it from anywhere. It works wonderfully. Grab it here. (It's also in the FreeBSD Ports collection if you happen to run that. :) One thing that I'm not sure of is if you can configure the AirPort from scratch using this. A quick note to the author could determine that.

I couldn't be happier with the thing, especially considering that it's some $500 cheaper than everything else out there. You can't beat that. V.90 modem and Ethernet. NAT or Bridge. It'll even do NAT for your ethernet if you connnect using it's modem. It's damned cute too. I think the only problem I have with it is lack of diagnostics when connecting using the modem.