Tales of Being TJ

So before we left to go over to my sister’s I had to hop online to check something. I don’t remember what, it’s really inconsequential.

“Hopping online” at our house is done through the Airport Extreme’s built-in 56K modem. That was the main reason that I bought this model. We have no other options out here in the boonies except for dialup, but I didn’t want to lose the convenience of WiFi.

I looked around but did not find many other models of router (nevermind wireless routers) which had a 56K modem in them. Apparently the world is moving on, and some of us are being left behind. Heck, even Apple has ditched a built-in modem in its computers, which may be fine for desktop computers but seems too soon for portables. After all, there is not WiFi everywhere, but phone lines are pretty much ubiquitous. (More on the modem in a moment.)

The Airport Extreme is expensive. It will run you $200 at the Apple Store, $196 at Amazon or $180 for academic Apple users, or $170 refurbished (when available). The refurbished site will remind you that the original price was $250.

Yowza.

Is it too expensive? Well, that depends.

If you have a regular always-on broadband connection and that’s all you need, it’s probably easily $150 over what you need to spend.

If you’re a Mac user need a wireless router with a dial-out modem, good luck finding another option. I found one router (which did not have WiFi) which had a built-in modem, but it had been discontinued. The Airport modem can be easily controlled and monitored through the Menu Bar in Mac OS X. 1

You also get a network printer (you can connect a USB printer — any USB printer, including that crappy $35 HP inkjet that they convinced you to buy before you found out that the ink cartridges are $40 to replace — and make it into a network printer, available from any computer on the network. 2

That’s pretty cool too.

And, of course, if you have a recent Mac, you’ll save $50 on a Apple USB Modem ($44 for academic users).

The modem also can be configured to let you dial in to your network (something that the only other non-wireless router with modem I found could not do). How many people will use this? I don’t know, but if you’re going to spend $200 for a wireless router with a built-in modem, you want it to make every option available.

It can also easily be extended through the Airport Express or a Linksys router.

So I’ve been fairly pleased with the whole thing, but I was surprised when even a Mac Sales Guy at an Apple store had no idea how the modem worked.

It’s fairly simple.

First you click on the Airport icon on the menu bar and you will see the dropdown shown here. Follow the icon to the right (shown here next to “Home 2”) and you will see the Connect/Disconnect option.

There is one little thing that I would like to point out, namely this:

If you are using the modem to connect, this is the screen you will see. Note that the phone number and account name have been redacted.

Now you’ll see that there are several settings there, from 30 seconds to 30 minutes.

Idle timeouts are tricky things. Namely, they are easily fooled. If you have, say, your email client set to check for mail every 10 minutes, and walk away from your computer, it will probably never trigger an idle timeout (this is true for all idle timeouts, not just Airport Extreme’s).

Likewise if you have an Instant Messenger program or RSS reader or some such, they too will usually send traffic over the line that makes it look like the account is active. (Or if you run Windows and made the mistake of installing WGA.)

Well, as it happened, I had set the idle timeout to never. This might not have even mattered, for the reasons stated above, but after I “hopped on” I apparently forgot to disconnect. Honest mistake.

Only problem: we left to go visit my sister before coming back. So we returned tonight and the internet connection has been up for 1 day, 16 hours, 23 minutes, and 05 seconds.

OOps. (Fortunately our voicemail works even if the phone is busy!)

I don’t suppose many people ever get to see what it looks like to be online for over 24 hours via an Airport Modem… so now you know. Don’t you feel better knowing that?

Footnotes:

1. Windows-only users will be less enthralled with the built-in modem of the Airport Extreme as Apple provides no way to dial the modem manually. This means that you pretty much have to set it up for dial-on-demand, which assumes that your phone line is always available. ↩
2. See Airport Printing with Unsupported Printer for more information on how to use any printer you want with an Airport Extreme. ↩