How To: Creating an extended network with Apple’s AirPort Extreme and Express

So here is the problem, you have a network but it isn’t quite powerful enough to cover your entire home/apartment/trailer/commune and you have either an AirPort Express or an AirPort Extreme 802.11n base station.  What you need to get is another AirPort Express and then set them up to extend your network’s signal.  You do this by taking the first Express/Extreme, give it a hard reset just for kicks (you can do this by pushing in the reset button on the back of the device and holding it in until the light on the front flickers rapidly - leave it plugged in while you do it).  Once it has been reset, check for available networks, you should see one called AppleNetwork now - join it.  Open the AirPort Utility program which will either be in your Start menu or in your Utilities folder inside of OS X.  You will then be guided through a series of prompts, the first of which will ask you for a username and password - this is for your internal settings and does not affect the name or password for your network.  The next step would ask you about your network, you would select that you do not have a network and you want to create one.  The next page asks you to name your network and to give it a wireless password, the default password it WPA/WPA2 Personal which is great unless you have older computers that run Windows 2000 or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or older.  If you do run older hardware, or have a Nintendo DS, set the security level to none, we’ll fix that in a little bit.  The next screen should ask you about how you connect to the internet, if you have a cable modem you go with option one, if you have a DSL modem that requires a PPPoE username and password to log in, then you go with option two.  If you selected the first option, ignore the next screen and hit continue, if you picked PPPoE, then you will fill out your username and password that your ISP provided you and hit continue.  The final screen says update, hit update.  At some point during these screens you may or may not have been presented with an option of using either bridge mode or sharing a single IP address, if you get the option you should usually select the option to share a single IP address.  Once the AirPort finishes updating, go back into AirPort Utility, select manual setup and go straight to the wireless tab, in this window you should see an option that says “Allow this network to be extended,” click on that to select it and then hit update.  If you notice at the bottom of this page, there are settings for your wireless security.  If you selected no security because of older devices on your network, this is where you will add in the WEP transitional security with a password that is EXACTLY 13 characters long.  If the light on the AirPort is not green after updating, you may need to turn off your modem for 3 to 5 minutes, making sure that there is no power or battery at all in the modem, and then turn it back on and you should find that you are up and running.  The next step is to add the second AirPort base station, in this case an Express, to extend your network.

Take the AirPort Express base station, if it is new then just plug it in, if it has been previously setup then give it a hard reset.  Connect to the AppleNetwork that the Express will be broadcasting and then open the AirPort Utility program again.  Give the Express a name and a password, a different name than the main base station, and then hit continue.  The options you will select on the following pages will be that you have a network and you want to join to it and that you want to wirelessly join the current network.  Depending on what version of AirPort Utility you have and what version of AirPort Express you are using you may see some different things at this point, some people might see an option to extend the network while others will go straight to a page that asks them to select the network that they want to join.  Obviously if you get the option to extend, take it.  If you get to the network setup page where you find your existing network and input the password for that network, you may get a check box that will allow you to extend the range of the network.  After that you simply update with your new settings and wait to see if the light turns green.  If it does then you are done, congratulations.

As a side note, sometimes we don’t get those great ‘extend’ options, we are only allowed to join the network, if that happens don’t worry, you can go into the manual setup section in AirPort Utility and go to the wireless tab and click on the wireless mode, you should see an option to extend a wireless network versus the option of simply joining a network.  Set it to extend and then update.  If all that fails, it may be time to setup a WDS (Wireless Distributed System) network which is a bit more involved.