Apple airport time capsule

Like Tesserax I am astounded you got 11 or so years out of Time Capsule.. Most of the first batch were dead in 18-24months with dead power supplies due to poor cooling. The old Airport Extreme not so much as it was a far superior design with external power supply. Just the same it is testament to how well it was built. Even commercial stuff is not really good for 10 years.

The time has come though to dump both. Wireless has moved on several generations in a decade.

we may need a new router since Apple is out of the business of airport time machine-Any advice?

Do you have the current setup linked by ethernet upstairs to downstairs or were you using wireless?

Much depends on the answer to that.

If you use ethernet it is much easier to setup a roaming network and get fast speeds than using wireless links.

If you are stuck with wireless then I would recommend you look at mesh like Netgear Orbi RBK50 which is usually the chart leader in the category. They are not cheap but will work far better than most. It also means you have ethernet ports available on both ends. Plus you can connect them by ethernet rather than wireless if you wish.

If you do have ethernet then Synology is worth a look. RT2600AC as router downstairs connected to the main modem or router.

High end Asus is another choice. Both brands can do mesh to similar products in their lineup. You always have to stick to single brand though. You can plug a large USB 3 drive into the Synology and use it for Time Machine if that is what you were doing with the Time Capsule. The Asus is also possible but it is not as reliable for TM although I think it is overall a better router.

Tell us what your requirements are and some idea of budget and we can suggest alternatives.. but is the link upstairs to downstairs ethernet??

What is the current modem? Make and model please.

Who is your ISP?

Ethernet between floors makes a big difference.

I do still need to know

1. What model is the modem? Is it also a router?
2. Were you using Time Capsule for Time Machine and do you wish to continue doing backups over the network?
3. Does the ISP support IPv6? Were you running IPv6 with the Airports? Some routers are less suitable than others with IPv6.
4. How important is wireless coverage and performance? Since you have been happily running decade old wireless gear I gather not a lot.. so are you using ethernet for most of the client devices? This includes aspects like how well roaming works.. for example, when you use wifi on iphone or iPad you want it to swap routers as you walk around. This is much more difficult to do than you might imagine. The Mesh gear does this well and the more pro gear.. like ubiquiti see below.. whereas normal domestic routers not so great.
5. Not sure how to word this one.. but how complicated a setup do you want?

For example a lot of us are moving away from domestic type routers to Ubiquiti products. They are perhaps 50% more price wise all up. Ubiquiti is more professional gear which you will give you long trouble free service, but a lot more difficult to setup if you have no knowledge of networks. Would you be doing the setup yourself or prepared to pay an installer to do it?

There is nothing wrong with routers from Synology and Asus I already recommended. I do still use the Asus router and have a Synology on standby (which I would use but doesn't work well with my ISP IPv6 setup). I have tested routers from lots of brands and those are the two I like best.

I am getting ready to move to Ubiquiti system which I have running in parts already as it has taken me a while to learn the system. For people who don't want to learn a whole lot of networking then stick to the higher end domestic type products. They are easy to configure and maintain. The easiest of the lot is Netgear Orbi.. which I have recommended for other jobs of this type mostly because people wanted excellent roaming without learning a whole lot of networking.

The simplicity comes at a cost of flexibility, so you cannot do Time Machine backups for example to a USB attached hard disk. For that we tend to recommend Synology NAS. This is expensive even if you buy a low end 2 disk model. It is something that can be used for many uses in your network.. with the proviso that Apple is headed to the Cloud (or has their head in the Clouds??) so if you are a Apple only household.. and want to stick with Apple it is better to just do backups locally until they work out how to backup Mac OS to iCloud which they have not yet managed.

The errors that you are seeing are typical when the communication between the AirPort base station and modem is not working properly. Which is currently being used as your "main" Internet router, the Time Capsule (TC) or your AirPort Extreme base station (AEBS)? That is which of these are connected directly to your Internet modem by Ethernet?

Which exact models are they? For example, if you purchased the AEBS in 2007, it could be a 1st generation (A1143) model and the TC could be 1st generation (A1254) model ... which actually came out in Jan 2008 ... but close enough.

If these are your base stations then it is amazing that they have been working for this long. Most consumer-grade networking hardware typically lasts 3-5 years. The fact that yours have worked for over 12 years is phenomenal.

Go for Ubiquiti unless the installer recommends otherwise.. they may have other systems they support. The advantage of the pro type system is they can check it remotely and even fix simple issues or if something fails it will tell them what happens.

If you are doing this yourself then the Netgear Orbi RBK50 and they have additional units with special features. From your point of view this is a great system that does not involve all that much to end users.. and will happily run ethernet backbone instead of wireless.

Keeping wired for the majority of the network is definitely going to keep reliability high. Wireless is for convenience in those places and devices that are impossible to run cords.