Cozy Tech — Reggie's Blog — Cozy Productions

Routers are an important piece of home technology that is often overlooked but is the source of most network-related issues. Having used ISP-provided routers, it is almost always recommended to switch it out for your own for a couple of reasons, not limited to

1. having to pay to rent the router*

2. long term reliability issues.

3. No way to manage the router.

4. (depending on ISP) the router may turn itself into an accessible hotspot for others like customers of the ISP, leeching your precious bandwidth.

The issue is that networking is a subset of the IT tree that literally does not makes sense to a lot of people. “The internet” is just something that happens to most people, and it's not something they want to even think about even a little bit, so they defer to the ISP to do it for them or they get their IT guy to help them set up a network. Well, I want to be that IT guy for everyone so before I get to the AirPort Extreme, I wanted to get to a topic that causes so much confusion for people who don’t know networking, And that's 2.4/5GHZ WiFi.

In the interest of not confusing and boring you, I’m going to keep this description of WiFi as simple as possible. When you make a connection that comes over a wire and transmit it wirelessly, you lose a lot of potential speed. So if you have a 10Mbps internet connection, for example, you may see only perhaps 6-8 Mbps of effective speed due to the latency. Compounding this is the spectrum. Most wireless devices utilize the 2.4 GHz WiFi Spectrum. The issue that this causes is that so many devices covering the same spectrum also leads to latency issues as well as overall connection issues. There is another wireless spectrum that can be used, however, and this is the 5GHZ band. In addition to the fact that only newer (ish) devices have a 5GHZ radio, the 5GHZ spectrum has less overall range than 2.4GHZ which in a way is a benefit because there is less effective range for devices to latch on and interfere with your precious bandwidth. Compounding these two things is the type of WiFi being used. The four most common types seen today are Wireless B, G, N, and AC. These letters represent the amount of theoretical speed that they will output. I say theoretical speed because of the speed loss due to wireless latency as well as band interference. Wireless AC is the top tier, having about a 1GBPS speed maximum over wifi.*

All of that was to be able to explain why I love the topic of this post, the AirPort Extreme. It is a wireless AC router created by Apple in 2013. It is the last router Apple has made, though it continues to be updated regularly to patch potential security holes and provide stability. It supports both the 2.4 and 5GHz bands and is a pretty sleek rectangular thing (that’s the best way I can describe it - it looks pretty cool in most environments and reminds me of Apple's previous obsession with white and matte plastic in their products). What makes this one of my favorite pieces of tech is that it is so dead simple to set up. The Airport utility (which is a default Mac app and can be downloaded for iOS) is easy to set up and troubleshoot and it just works. It works so well, I recommend it and use it when I am rolling out home networks for people. It's really that good. You would think a router from the early 2010s would be useless in 2020 and obsolete, but it's not. Since Wireless AD is still new and isn’t even included in most devices yet, I predict that it will be at least 2 years before wireless AD is adopted industry-wide and probably another year from then for the technology to mature where the theoretical speed can be generally realized like how Wireless AC is currently after years on the market. Even then, I would still recommend the AirPort Extreme…..if and ONLY if Apple continues to update it for security. The second that stops, I will sadly have to move on. But, in a surprising move, Apple supports their entire Airport line from 2007 onwards even though these are products that apple call “vintage” and provide no hardware support for whatsoever. That’s very unlike apple, but I love it and I hope they keep doing so until they see that most of them are dead or the technology is terribly outdated. But then again, Wireless n is horrendously outdated.

*The latest standard is Wireless AD, which is capable of ridiculous speed and throughput. However, it uses an even higher 60GHZ spectrum, which has an even shorter range than 5GHZ and doesn’t like walls and obstructions at all. This makes it hard to justify (for now) the premium that you will be paying in order to get this tech.

Cozy Tech is a series dedicated to showcasing some of the cool stuff I use every day. In this post I want to highlight a integral part of my daily commute: the Juiced Bikes u350/u500 electric bike. I mention both models because both the u350 and u500 use the exact same step-over frame. The only difference between the two is down to things such as the wattage on the motor, the transmission, as well as small things like fenders and higher quality braking mechanisms. I use the u500 version. As with all electric bikes in the US, it has a top speed of 20 miles per hour, though you can go much faster than that with some pedaling. It has a twist throttle to start the motor and reacts as soon as you twist it. It is also a very smooth and steady ride as it slowly gets up to top speed. It also has a cruise control function On the back of its large cargo rack houses the battery, which you can upgrade from 15ah all the way up to a whopping 32ah, which can get you close to 100 miles on a single charge. I opted for the 23ah version as the 32ah version was too steep of a price to afford. I like that the motor is placed on the front tire as it allows for the bike to have even weight distribution while carrying the almost 70-pound frame. But the killer feature for me is the support. Juiced Bikes has some of the best support I have ever dealt with from any company including Amazon. They are very responsive and they will help you with any issue with the bike that you come across. Even before I purchased the bike they helped me with figuring out the pros and cons of buying whichever bike. They even gave me a discount when I bought the 23ah battery, which they did not have to do since I was already buying the bike but it really sweetened the deal. All in all it is a great bike and if you can bear the price (the u350 starts at 1500, with the u500 starting at 2,000) it is well worth the investment.

**UPDATE**

I have used this bike for the last 8 months now and it is still the best investment I have made. It doesn't look as clean anymore, but it still holds up. The modular nature of the bike has become the killer feature for me. Even though the bike is waterproof, I seemed to have gotten water in one of the connectors and since then the cruise control has stopped functioning. In addition, the bike would randomly not throttle or throttle when I wouldn't want it to. After some diagnosing, I found that one of the connections in the battery indicator had water damage, which caused the issue. Normally, this would mean I would have to now go and attempt to get it fixed at a bike shop which would involve quite a bit of work (in New York, it’s incredibly hard to find someone that will service your bike if it is electric). But since every part of the bike is a series of interconnected cables that disconnect from each other, all I had to do is disconnect the cable that goes to the battery indicator and Viola! Working bike. Yes, I don't know how much power I have left in my battery and I can’t use cruise control, but I have a functional bike until it is time to replace that connector, which is as simple as getting new cables for that section of the bike. Very cozy.