Can Airport Extreme be used with another wireless router? (1 Viewer)

[Carlo_M]

Here's the story, I have a DLink wireless router that's about 3-4 years old. It is 802.11b/g. It performs well enough for the other laptops in the apartment, which are all 802.11g, but I know with my 2.33 C2D Macbook Pro that I can get faster if I buy a draft-N wireless router. I've been looking at Apple's Airport extreme because of the positive reviews.

However my DLink does one thing that, no matter how many manuals and users I ask, I don't think Airport Extreme does: let me manually release and renew my IP address.

Couple this with the fact that if you connect a variety of .g and .n machines wirelessly to a router, the speed drops to the slower speed on the network.

So now I'm thinking of this:

1. Keep my DLink as the main router connected to the cable modem. Have that still transmit wirelessly in the .b/.g spectrum. This should allow me to still release and renew the IP address as needed. All non .n devices will connect to this (this will also save me from having to set a new security passcode to all of the wireless devices).

2. Buy an Airport Extreme and hook it up (kind of daisy chain it?) to the DLink. This won't serve as my primary router. But I can set it to 5GHz (we have a ton of 2.4 GHz devices in the apartment) and tell it to only accept .n devices, thus having no speed loss for my MBP.

Is this a feasible setup? Anyone see any problems?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Andrew Pratt]

Yes that's possible to do. You'd just assign the Apple router to a manual IP range that's outside what the DLink is providing to its clients...at least I believe that's all that's required.

 

[JeremyErwin]

Designing Airport Networks Using Airport Utility may be useful.

You can set up the Airport in bridge mode as well.