Review: D-Link’s Airport Alternative

I am homeless…to a certain degree. Actually, if you live in the U.S. right now you are paying for my home. No, I’m not on wellfare, my family is in a hotel as we depart to go back to the states. While in the hotel I had to have internet, as I have already mentioned. Unfortunately, my Mac Mini is airportless, so I decided to look around for another option while I was stuck in a hotel.

Our American electronic store, the Powerzone, here in Germany is not the best, they do not carry any Apple products, so finding an airport alternative was not an easy task. My friend and former youth leader, Anthony, and I went to the Powerzone looking for something though. While there we came across D-Link’s DWL-G132, which is called the Airplus 802.11G reciever, for 60 dollars. I figured that this would work on my G4 Mac Mini, but after looking at it closely it did not support OS X. So I decided to go to our German Apple store down the road to check out Airport, despite our terrible dollar-to-euro exchange rates and Airport’s price.

While there I got to test out the new Macbook, which is amazing by the way, and I was able to look and find that D-Link’s DWL-G122 supports OS X. So I ran to a German store, Media Markt, with Anthony and found the DWL-G122 for 30 Euro, no more than 40 dollars, so I picked it up.

I got back to my hotel, hooked up the device, which is a little thicker than a typical USB thumb drive, installed the new drivers and was connected to our slow hotel internet.

The D-Link DWL-G122 is a good device for those who do not have airport, it picks up signals well, shows a changing range meter, which sometimes changes every few seconds for me, and allows you to save WEP encryptions, so you do not have to enter them again. (which I really enjoy)

The device seems to run well, but our internet here is very unstable, I will have a 100% connection here and then it will cut out completely. Setting up the device is easy, a simple installation of drivers, and adding the device in the Network option under System Preferences in OS X will do the trick.

For nearly 60 dollars less I feel like I have a device that works just as well as Airport, which I used when I was using a Powerbook this year. To anyone who needs Airport (for a G4 or older, it has yet to support Intel Macs) I highly recommend looking at D-Link and picking up the DWL-G122.