Only some macs made after Jan. '03 are AE ready. And even then only the high end ones boast AE for a while. I guess that would include the entire G5 line, the PowerBooks, the iMac, and now the G4 iBook. Your computer would have to be fairly new to be AE ready. My TiBook from last November isn't even AE capable, although I wish someone would make a card that combines the "g" standard with Bluetooth and would fit in my TiBook.
And as someone pointed out earlier, the speed bottleneck is your internet connection, not your AE base station. I doubt you are getting more than 1.5Mbps internet, and your AE has 54Mbps of speed to deal with it. The problem comes in when you try to transfer large files, or large amounts of files, from one computer to another over the wireless network. If you need to do that however, just connect an ethernet cable (doesn't need to be a crossover cable either if it's between 2 fairly new macs) between them. Or if it is a constant problem, get a 10/100 hub and connect it to the one ethernet port on the AE. Leave cables at the locations where file transfers are likely to happen, and just plug in. Of course you could always go to Firewire Target Disk Mode too, and that's 400Mbps. Or if you are using the Power line, it can be Gigabit wired. Now thats some fast transfering!
Edit:
Here's the link to Apples list of AE compatible computers.
