New router

In hopes of resolving some home networking issues, I retired my Linksys WRT54G today for an Apple Airport Extreme. I already have two of the Airport Express minirouters on the network, and my home computer setup has morphed from a mix of Macs and PCs to an all-Mac environment.

The WRT54G is the Buick Century of routers. It's been around a long time and is very solid, very reliable. I've had three of them.

The Airport Extreme is, well, the Airport Extreme. I don't think it has an automotive equivalent. It costs more than most routers and has fewer features than the Linksys. But I'm hoping it will work with Apple's .mac backtomymac service. This worked fine for me until Apple issued an update to 'fix' it for users who couldn't get it to work. That solved their problems, apparently, but seemed to kill the service for me. I'll find out tomorrow if switching to the Apple router solves the problem.

But one thing I noticed right away is that certain ad-heavy web sites - such as HuffPo and myspace - seem to load faster with the Apple router. You may already know this, but the content in the ads on those pages come from a different source than the content itself. In fact, ads on a single web page may come from several different sources. I thought the slowness of these ads to load was the result of overloaded servers at the ad suppliers, but now I wonder if it was something in the old router that caused the delay.

Again, this is all perception and not research, so don't throw away a router or buy a new one based on this. I'm just sayin'...