airport extreme as a extender and router?

I would first suggest that you verify that the 4G 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (AEBSn) is configured properly to extend the wireless range of the 5G base station. Please review the following Apple Support article and post back your results.

The reason I am asking you to go through the trouble of verifying that both base stations are configured for an extended network is that, if by chance, you actually have the 4G AEBSn joining the 5G's network, the 4G's LAN ports would not be active.

When extending, the 4G AEBSn would be in bridge mode and all of its Ethernet ports should be active. If that's not the case for your older Mac do you have another computer that you can connect by Ethernet to be sure it's not an issue with the Mac itself?

Hello Tesserax, I am facing the similiar problem to use older version of Airport extreme as an repeater / network extender in the house. Our main router, however, is not a Apple product. We use Buffalo as router. No matter how we change config, we simple can not get it to work. For once, we did get connected, but there is no actual internet activity.

Please let me know how this can work. Thanks!!

Please let me know how this can work.

Unfortunately, it is extremely unlikely that this will work.

The reason for this is that Apple has designed their routers to only "extend" a wireless signal from another Apple router.

Another way of saying the same thing is that you will need to have two Apple routers if you want to be able to extend the wireless signal wirelessly.

Thanks very much for the quick response, Bob. I guess I wasted the whole afternoon then. What a disappointment.