Apple discontinues Airport base stations.. whats next?

Apple has officially discontinued the production of their AirPort devices. AirPort Express, Extreme and Time Capsules. This has come as no surprise as they have been relatively stagnant in this area for quite some time.

Apple first introduced the Airport Base Station back in 1999. Since then, the company made incredibly reliable, easy to configure WiFi base stations and routers - making it easy and accessible to the masses to have WiFi in their own homes and offices.

Today, as WiFi has become ubiquitous and critical to nearly all businesses and homes, demand, and expectation for fast, reliable WiFi is higher than ever, even the smallest of dead spots can cause downtime, drops in productivity, and hair pulling frustration. The days of the single router / access point is over.

At Leftbrain we have long been deploying controller-based WiFi systems, based on Cisco Meraki and UniFi platforms to our clients. A cloud based controller allows the ability to centrally manage the wireless network either on site, or remotely. Advantages of these systems also include;

• Propagation of all settings to all devices within seconds.
• Rolling upgrades, all devices need updates at some point for security or functionality purposes, with a rolling upgrade this means that only one device will update at a time allowing for the network to remain accessible.
• Roaming from one access point to another, the seamless handoff from one WiFi access point to another when a better signal is available, just like your mobile phone.
• Added security through filters, rules, multiple SSIDs and also with RADIUS (more on this later!),

If you’re still using Airport Extremes, or Apple Time Capsules, and would like to see how much faster you can push your WiFi, get in touch to book in your free business WiFi assessment and survey.