Apple Airport Network Setup
# Setting Up Your Apple Airport Router: A Step-by-Step Guide
## Introduction
Hello everyone, this is Aaron from Zolot Tech. In today’s video, I wanted to show you how to set up your airport router, also known as an Apple router setup. Here’s the Airport Utility, and in the Airport Utility, we can see my home network. If you didn’t catch the other video, we took a look at the new Airport Express, which looks like an Apple TV. You can see it right there—it’s a great little device.
Originally, I had a Time Capsule, this is the original 500 GB model. I have some other things on my network too, but this is the basic setup for my network. Here, I have my Airport Express, which is actually acting as the main router now. If I tap on it, you can see that I can go into my Airport Express settings and enter the password.
## Exploring Network Settings
Going into the Airport Express settings, here’s what you’ll see: my IP address, my LAN IP address, my version of software, network hardware info, and more. If I go into the network section, you can see the security settings that I have set up, as well as the different bands or channels. Going back to Hardware Info, we’ve got all the information there. What you want to do is hit “Edit,” and this will show you the network itself.
The network itself is set up pretty simply. Now, a lot of people, including myself, were very disappointed when Apple changed the Airport setup. The reason being that they seemed to have oversimplified things. However, they haven’t— it just takes some time to get used to and does a lot of things for you that you used to have to do yourself.
Here’s the internet connection—you can see that you can set all these things up yourself or just let it do it itself. I prefer its own method. There’s my base station password—there are two passwords: one for the base station or router and one for your SSID itself.
## Guest Network and AirPlay Integration
Here, we have a guest network option. We can turn on a guest network, which will allow others to connect. For example, if you have friends over, you can leave that network open or put it on a simple password so those friends won’t have access to your main network.
You can also see there’s AirPlay, which is great if you have an AirPlay device. It allows you to play music across the network. Then we have some advanced options in Wi-Fi settings—IPv6 is long-supported by Apple, and we’ve got a lot of different things here.
## Airport Router Capabilities
The great thing about Airport is the way they set up themselves. This is an extension of my main network—it’s the exact same thing, giving good connection strength. It actually is a switching router, which means it will support B, G, and N bands simultaneously. What that means is, for example, if I have an iPad that’s an N device, or I have a G device, it won’t slow down like the Time Capsule would. The original Time Capsule was not dual band, so it would slow down to the slower connection and use that frequency as well.
We ran into some issues there, but basically, we’ve extended the network seamlessly. What I wanted to do is show you how that works. So what I’ll do is reset my time capsule—it actually won’t wipe my data, but it will reset the settings—and we’ll come back and show you how that’s set up and how simple this really is.
## Extending Your Network
Now, you can see the Time Capsule itself has gone away—it kind of faded out there. Let’s go back home. What we’ll do is go to Wi-Fi settings, and it will find the Time Capsule. If I go over here and click on Wi-Fi, here it says “Set Up an Airport Base Station.” I didn’t have to do anything—I didn’t have to set up Wi-Fi; this could be when you have no Wi-Fi, it just finds it. Tap on it—it’s going to give us a couple options. So it saw the Time Capsule, it’s reading its settings and says: What do you want to do? You want to extend the network or other options. In this case, I just want to extend my network—I want to give better coverage.
Mind you, this Time Capsule is wirelessly extending my network—I only have the power cable plugged into it; it grabs the signal off the base station and extends it wirelessly. Now, you will lose some speed in turn based on that, but it’s really not too noticeable unless you’re doing really heavy-duty file transfer. In that case, I would suggest extending it with an Ethernet cable, but for my purposes, I don’t need that. So what I’m going to do is hit “Next,” or here we can go to other options, but in this case, I want to do “Next.” I’m going to keep it the same name next—and what it’s going to do is set it up all on its own.
If I was to get another Airport Express or another Time Capsule, I could do the exact same thing or I could create a separate network. But a lot of the time, to do that, you actually have to give it an Ethernet cable for an internet connection. So it’s waiting for the Time Capsule—what it does is updates it, restarts it with the settings. I can hear it spinning up now—I can hear the hard drive—and we’ll wait for it to come back online. It’s come back up online—I’ll hit “Done,” and now what I’ll do is go back over to my Airport Utility, and you can see it’s returned—it’s got a green light status, and we’re back and running— incredibly simple network setup.
## Conclusion
There are a lot of options you can do port forwarding—it does not have UPnP, but that’s not really a bad thing; there’s no port forward or there is port forwarding, and it really is very easy to set all of this up. It’s—it’s a great great setup. I know some people aren’t a big fan of their routers, but they’re pretty decent routers if you look up some information on them and what they’re capable of—and they give pretty good coverage as well.
So if any of you have used these—if you’ve extended your network using these—let me know your network setup in the comments below—I know some people have a ton of routers set up. I’ve set up larger networks with these as well.
As always, thanks for watching—this is Aaron, I’ll see you next time!