[Cu-wireless] Airport Extreme 802.11g base station w/ bridging

[David Young]

You may have heard now that Apple has a new Airport Extreme base station
which supports 802.11b and the draft standard for 802.11g.  An antenna
connector is exposed, and Dr. Bott sells add-on antennas for it.

What is most promising to me about the Extreme base station is that this
vague market-ese seems to be describing a more sophisticated wireless
bridging function than comparably-priced base stations ($250) provide:

        Previously, all AirPort Base Stations required a physical
        connection to the Internet. With wireless bridging, two or
        more AirPort Extreme Base Stations can be connected wirelessly,
        effectively increasing the range of your network as far and wide
        as you'd like.

Any number of cheap APs will serve as bridge "master" for one or more
bridge "slave" APs, but it sounds to me like the Extreme might support
an arbitrary link topology with the spanning tree protocol.  That would
make it suitable for an inexpensive layer-2 "local distribution" spanning
a block.

If somebody finds out any detail what this new Airport really does,
I sure would like to hear it.

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Engineering from the Right Brain
                        Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933