h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This thing just works. If you've got an iBook, you just lift up the keyboard and slide a card in. Then, you get a Base Station, plug that in, attach it to the cable modem/DSL/regular modem/Ethernet hub, and run the little setup assistant on your iBook. In about two minutes, the thing's configured with either NAT translation or DHCP, and can act as a router for your entire LAN. It's completely easy and you can set the whole thing up in about five minutes.

Also, the Base Station is cool-looking...it looks like a little UFO. Very nice. It's not ugly like most routers, and only has two wires coming out of it.

A word of caution, though... I've read an article which says that when a new machine moves into range of a network of four or more existing machines, all communications can stop functioning for over a minute while they all "negotiate" their bandwidth allocations. As more machines arrive, these outages can increase exponentially. Ironically, it was pointed out, this behaviour was first noticed in an airport!

I don't think that happens with the newest version of the software. At WWDC, a giant AirPort network served probably several hundred computers in the San Jose Convention Center, and nothing untoward happened.

That may be the case. From what I remember, this was from an article by Jerry Pournelle on his way to Comdex, with the very first generation of AirPort adapter fitted as an experiment. He ended up in a lounge-full of other journalists with the same idea. It happened just before the system was on sale to the public, but he said that to his knowledge at the time of writing (after the system was released) nothing had been done to rectify the problem.

This is all dependent on my hazy memory, as the original article is long gone...

Yes, the original AirPort was not quite ready for primetime, but now, with version 1.3, it's pretty much kink-free. If you're a Mac user who wants wireless connectivity, it's great. Easy to use and affordable.