USB printing for Mac OS X El Capitan

[CowboyDog]

I am in process of upgrading my Internet access from Comcast (~50Mb/s download) to Fiber (neighbors are getting > 700Mb/s downloads) and my old reliable Apple Airport Extreme 802.11n (MD031LL/A) will now be the bottleneck. I am looking to upgrade my wireless router.

Our house consists of Apple devices- Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV (mixture of new and old HW, but all the Macs have been upgraded to El Capitan); combined with an Xbox One, Roku, DirectTV Genie, etc. One of the reasons I bought the Airport Extreme many years ago is that we hook up printers to a USB hub connected to its USB port so everyone can print from anywhere in the house. This is important for us.

I have been reading many reviews on which router to get and my initial thought was to just get the newer Apple Extreme 802.11ac, but the throughout compared to some of the other routers is pretty lame. AC1900 seems like a sweet spot right now and was focusing on those routers.

The question I am trying to answer is what routers support you hooking up a USB printer and being able to print from a Mac with El Capitan installed. I have read that the USB "control" applications for Netgear, Linksys, and TP-Link do not support El Capitan; and I can't seem to find a clear answer regarding Asus.

So I am looking for some guidance regarding with router will support USB printing through the router from a Mac with El Capitan installed.

Thanks in advance.

 

[sfx2000]

Keep the old Airport around - configure it as a client, and you'll be good to go...

 

[CowboyDog]

Thanks a lot. I should have thought of this. Never set it up as a client, but should be able to figure it out. I assume I will be able to run hard wired cable between the new router and the Airport Extreme (since they will be right next to one another).

Thanks again.

 

[sfx2000]

Thanks a lot. I should have thought of this. Never set it up as a client, but should be able to figure it out. I assume I will be able to run hard wired cable between the new router and the Airport Extreme (since they will be right next to one another).

Thanks again.

Yep, just put it into Bridge mode and run a cable over...

Little tip - with a USB hub, you can run both the printer sharing and add a USB hard disk as a poor man's NAS... and it'll work fine as either a TimeMachine target or a Shared Disk...

Not super fast, but it's cheap

 

[sfx2000]

BTW - you can turn the B/G/N/A radios off on the Airport, look under the wireless Tab, and with it set to Bridge Mode, it should disable the DHCP server, but check it anyways..