My New Wireless Solution

Welcome to my Apple equipped home, and let me introduce you to my latest device: Time Capsule.

Time Capsule is first of all a wireless accesspoint, but also a 500 GB Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. Needless to say, it works seamlessly with MacOS X 10.5′s inbuilt backup solution Time Machine. But it is not restricted to working with only 10.5 or MacOS X, and is of course also working with Windows and Linux. But having said that, Time Capsule only comes with installation and administration software for MacOS X and Windows. The setup takes a matter of minutes, and once it’s up and running, its disk drive is visible to any computer on the network.

As you can see from this first screenshot, Apple has done it real easy to set Time Capsule up for you and they have also made some sensible security choices for you: WEP is not an option. As this device is not for the enterprise, only WPA/WPA 2 Personal is available as wireless security.

Time Capsule of course supports 802.11n Wi-fi, and comes with one USB 2.0 port and three Gigabit Ethernet ports. The USB port can be equipped with a printer or an external harddisk.

I guess you have already gone WOW, 802.11n!!! Well, I have already had a D-link 802.11n accesspoint, and don’t get me wrong, I was quite happy with it, but gave it to my parents. The main reason was that I wanted to retire my noisy Lacie NAS disk, and get rid of at least one device from my shelf in the hall (and by that hopefully also some dust). For those of you knew to NAS, here is the catch with backup over wireless: Even over a high-speed 802.11n network, your initial backup will take many hours. Apple should have advised buyers of Time Capsule to do the first backup over one of Time Capsule’s Gigabit Ethernet ports. After that, subsequent backups are incremental and should hopefully only take a few minutes over your Wi-Fi connection.

TimeCapsule has a beautiful design, but other then that it is far from perfect. It is simply a backup device for Time Machine. It lacks basic NAS functionality as UPnP support, and can therefor not be seen by my XBOX 360 (or a Playstation3 for that matter). My question is almost, has Apple done this on purpose? Simply to make ways for Apple TV in to living rooms?

Another problem is, as so often, that Apple products are known to be quite hot, so also Time Capsule. I am not talking about the delivering list this product has in shops across Norway, when writing this. But simply the fact that Time Capsule runs very hot for a device that is designed to be left on all the time!

One last word, my VoIP solution from Phonzo worked without any problems.