Ben Brooks on the consumer wireless router market:

In my opinion you are wasting your money if you buy anything other than the Apple Airport Extreme/Time Capsule.

I totally agree with this sentiment and the nine reasons he lists to support his view. The Airport Extreme is the only router I recommend to people.

I mean, there’s just no reason wireless networking has to be hard or eat up your evenings. At least not anymore. Ten years ago, successful wireless routing required a masochistic mixture of persistence and mouth holding.

I’m done fiddling with firmware and visualizing antenna donuts.

My current wireless setup centers around an Airport Extreme, which stays in a central location on the first floor of our home (where we use the internet the most).

There are many things I love about the Airport Extreme, but my favorite by far is its ability to create dependable dual-band and guest networks.

Our main home network is dual-band. It’s protected by a very long, secure password. We use a simpler password for our guest network that’s easy to say out loud to guests.

Gone are the days of punishing guests by making them enter the crazy-long password that protects our main network. And gone are the days when guests have to be on the same network as my tax returns.

The dual-banding on our main network is seriously the stuff of magic. I love how all of my devices see one network name, but N devices jump on at N speeds while old devices (like my ancient TiVo player with unlimited prepaid service) get on at G speeds. I used to maintain two routers for this purpose. Trust me when I say one really good router is way better than two mediocre ones.

I’m sure I probably could have saved a few bucks with a cheaper router, but the extra money I spent on the Airport Extreme has paid me back far more in time.