Question about Airport Express Base Station

[brig2221]

I recently purchased my first Mac, a 13" Macbook Pro. I really love it so far.

The think is, my Macbook Pro is servicing as a desktop replacement to my old Dell 8200 tower. To that end, I have a Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse to keep my USB ports free.

I have a standard HP printer, and I was trying to think of a way I could go wireless, and it hit me that if I used an Airport Express Base Station, that I could plug my printer directly into that, and then wirelessly print, thus keeping both of my USB ports open.

Here is my question. I currently have AT&T U-Verse service. As part of that service, they set you up with a 2WIRE Wireless G Router. I haven't had any problems with it to date.

That said, I am curious how I would go about using the Airport Express Base Station. Would I simply plug in an ethernet cable from my 2WIRE wireless router into the Airport Express Router, and then have two separate Wireless signals in my house?

I am confused. What is making this difficult is that I cannot get rid of the 2WIRE router due to it being necessary for my Internet and TV service.

 

[aristobrat]

IIRC, you can configure the Express to join your existing wireless network instead of having to create a second wireless network.

 

[brig2221]

IIRC, you can configure the Express to join your existing wireless network instead of having to create a second wireless network.

That is certainly a start, but with my Macbook being Wireless N, and the Airport Express Base Station being Wireless N as well, I would really want to use that if at all possible.

 

[bohbot16]

Can you disable the wireless radio in the 2WIRE but leave it running as a wired router? If so, you could run an ethernet cable to the Express and set it up in bridge mode to create the wireless portion of your network.

 

[balamw]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16)

Can you disable the wireless radio in the 2WIRE but leave it running as a wired router? If so, you could run an ethernet cable to the Express and set it up in bridge mode to create the wireless portion of your network.

I have done exactly that with two FiOS installs. Disable wireless on the FiOS router and create the WLAN with the AEBS and Time Capsule.

B

 

[skorpien]

Can you disable the wireless radio in the 2WIRE but leave it running as a wired router? If so, you could run an ethernet cable to the Express and set it up in bridge mode to create the wireless portion of your network.

I would suggest setting up the Express in Bridge Mode but keeping the 2WIRE radio active. This way you can set up the Express to transmit an 802.11n only (5 GHz) SSID and still be able to connect g devices to your network (on the 2WIRE SSID). And since the Express will be set in bridge mode, devices connected to either SSID will be able to access the shared printer and AirTunes if you choose to set that up.

Additionally, any n devices (such as your MBP) will connect at 300 Mbps rather than 170 Mbps on a mixed b/g/n network which you would need if you are to disable the 2WIRE radio (to keep b/g compatibility). And that doesn't take into account the speed hit you'll take when b/g devices are active on the mixed network.