View Full Version : Airport Extreme - Bridging

Jul 20, 2003, 09:48 AM
I am wandering, if anybody can share experiences with the bridging feature of Airport Extreme.

I want to use 3 basestations to make it's reach bigger, and the three stations should fit my needs, but can anybody tell me if it really works?

And stuff like is it stable, and can you walk from one basestation to an other without losing signal, and most importanly, is it low maintainance, because I want to put one station out of my direct reach.

Thanks for any information on the matter.

Jul 20, 2003, 02:34 PM
I'm in the process of setting this up at work. My building is not hooked to the internet as the rest of the buildings are. So I found the closest line to my building and put an AE base station there, bridged to another one inside my building. It worked in that they'd communicate with each other, but the range was just a bit too far so a 3rd base station was added. So far the 3 base station setup hasn't worked. It's just a configuration problem though--and I haven't had time to make it all work.

If you set your laptop to "join strongest network" or whatever it's called then it's seamless. I also suspect that if you named all 3 networks the same thing and broadcast them all on the same channel that it would do the same thing.

The low maintainence issue is yet to be decided. In my setup 2 of the base stations are hidden away, so easy troubleshooting might be a pain. AE base stations sometimes want to stop broadcasting so that could be a pain.

Would it be possible for you to use an external antenna? If I had to do my network over again that's what I'd do.

Jul 21, 2003, 04:03 PM
Thanks for the insight, I'm getting ready to buy an other two...