Ok so I’ve finally ditched my Netgear DG834N Wireless Router and picked up an Apple Time Capsule 1TB. I did a bit of research before I bought it to find out the best DSL Modem to use with it. Turns out it was a person selling their old modem on eBay that gave me the biggest tip, he pointed me in the direction of the Draytek Vigor 110 modem, and it was exactly what I’ve been looking for.

DrayTek Vigor 110

DrayTek Vigor 110

Can you remember back in the day when Broadband companies only gave you a USB modem, and you were very lucky if you got one with an Ethernet port? The BT Voyager 205 springs to my mind! I had one of those and hooked up a wireless router to it via ethernet. The only trouble you had then was, not only did you have two devices to setup, you also had two NAT’s to run which would cause havoc with Torrent apps. The DrayTek Vigor is different though, it provides you with a clean, untouched, single IP internet connection without any setup required. Here are the steps I took to get my new setup connected.

  1. Plugged the Time Capsule and DrayTek Vigor into mains.
  2. Connected the phone cable to the Vigor.
  3. Joined the Vigor and Time Capsule with an Ethernet cable.
  4. Started my iMac up, it found the Time Capsule straight away as a Wireless device so I connected to it then started AirPort Utility.
  5. I followed the simple setup and chose to connect to my modem via PPPoE, it then asked me my ISP’s Username and Password.
  6. Once I entered all the information I chose a WPA2 Key to secure my network and I was up and running.
Straight away I noticed the speed difference compared to my old Netgear DG834N, even websites seemed a bit snappier. Even though the Netgear was an N-spec router, and it connected fine at 130mbps to all my N-spec Macs, it was always a very unreliable signal. It would regularly stop broadcasting my iTunes Shared Library for some reason and would need rebooting to find it again. Another major issue with it was, if there was ever a power cut, or if you wanted to reboot it by unplugging the power cable, it wouldn’t turn back on unless you left it unplugged for at least 10 minutes. This used to infuriate me, especially after the reliability of my older, DG834G router.
So onto signal strength, before buying the Time Capsule I read that the signal was far worse than Apple’s WiFi dedicated AirPort Extreme BaseStation, even to the point people were getting aftermarket aerials fitted to boost the range. Well I have to say so far I have had none of these issues. My Time Capsule seems to have similar distance to my old router but it is far more reliable. In places where my girlfriends PowerBook 12″ would pick up then lose signal with the Netgear, it seems rock solid so far with the Time Capsule, so it can’t be all bad.

The next thing I’m going to be doing it moving my entire iTunes Library onto the Time Capsule and also setting it up as a file server so I can access everything from wherever there’s an internet connection using my MacBook. So stay tuned for more updates in the future.

Time Capsule Unboxed

Time Capsule Unboxed

November 21, 2008 at 3:53 pm by Tom
Category: Other
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