My allegiance to Apple is wavering. I came home to find my home wireless network down. I walked over to my Apple Airport Basestation and saw that instead of emitting reassuring green lights, it was alternating between lighting the left red light and then all three amber lights. I searched on apple’s website for troubleshooting information without any luck. Finally, (thanks again to Google) I found these 3 reports of Basestations that had bit the dust shortly after warranty expiration:

• The first casualty
• O’Reilly Report
• Another one - Dead link

Mine failed 15 months after it’s arrival on my doorstep. Conspiracy?

Anyway, it served me well for 15 months, but I decided to go with the SMC Barricade Wireless Broadband Router for my next basestation. It has 3 wired ports, acts as a print server and has a greater range (although that’s not really too important in my shoebox here). It’ll be here sometime next week.

So I’ve gone from having rock-solid wireless access to a lightning fast cable internet connection 2 months ago to a wired connection to a 56K dialup modem today. I can see the internet gods up there laughing at me :-)