Gravitational Pull

Apple’s Time Capsule plays nice with Verizon’s FIOS

Posted on 20 March 2008

Wow, that was easy. Sometimes Apple’s auto-magic, self-configuring stuff works just as advertised. Sometimes, it’s Apple’s penchant for knowing how to simplify the front-end to hide the wacky back-end that carries the day. In the case of the new Time Capsule wireless base station with hard drive, it’s both. Phew.

I’ve been using OS X 10.5′s Time Machine program to do constant back ups of my iMac, which is pretty easy since the 60 lb behemoth doesn’t travel much. It’s hooked into a Western Digital external hard drive via firewire and Time Machine just does its thing whenever it damn well pleases. But my Macbook Pro is constantly running all over the place so backing up to an external drive happens much less than it should. A hard drive with wireless access seemed like just the ticket. I wandered over to the Natick Mall’s cozy Apple store and picked up a Time Capsule 1 TB version.

Then it sat in the box. We have Verizon’s spiffy FIOS broadband Internet service, which requires use of a Verizon-supplied wireless router, and I was worried that svelte, suave Mister Time Capsule wouldn’t play nice with Mister Ugly Black Box Actiontec Router from Verizon. Luckily, my fears were misplaced. Apple’s new Airport setup software walked me through a variety of scenarios and within literally 5 minutes, I had connected the Time Capsule via an ethernet cord to the old router and set it up to run a parallel wifi network at 802.11n speeds. The old router is still king of Internet connections and assigning network addresses 9it’s still the DHCP server in geek speak). Nifty.

As you can see from the photos, the Time Capsule is compact and all-white with a shiny silver Apple logo on the top. It’s also whisper quiet even when the hard drive is active. I have found file transfer performance acceptable. I copied an 841 MB file (the latest patch for Civilization IV: Warlords, if you must know) from my iMac to the Capsule in under 2 minutes via ethernet and then to my nearby Macbook Pro via Wifi N in about the same time. Hopefully, they won’t come out with a greatly improved edition in six months.

Minor additional data point: I ran some file transfer tests using AJA Kona System Test. Files were written to the Capsule pretty consistently at just under 6 MB/s and read at about 8 MB/s when connected over a 5 GHz wifi “n” channel. At that writing rate, you’d be able to transfer over 21 GB an hour, according to the Forret bandwidth conversion calculator.

p.s. Check eBay if you want you want to buy my old Airport Extreme base station or an original issue iSight camera.