802.11g and AirPort Extreme Update
Adam and I have written a 3,000-word article on the state of 802.11g equipment including an enormous amount of detail about AirPort Extreme: both the Base Station and the AirPort Extreme Card. This article will be available next week as a downloadable PDF with illustrations and photos, too.
Your feedback is highly welcome! You're seeing an early draft of what will be incorporated into a mythical next edition of The Wireless Networking Starter Kit, and we're always eager to hear more detail or get direction from people using the technology.
Comments
Hi Glenn,
I am an editor of a electronic Chinese Mac magzine. We are a non-profit magazine and we publish our magazine with PDF format document. I found that your AirPort Extreme is very useful to our reader. I was wondering if you can give me the permission to translate it into Chinese?
Thanks for your help very much.
Best regards,
Sean Wu
http://www.maczin.com
Posted by: Sean | January 17, 2003 07:22 PM
The article had a lot of information, but no review. How well
did it work for you? Were able to transfer a file at 54Mbs, or
is the real world speed much less than the theoretical
maximum? How did it fare with interference from microwaves,
2.4ghz phones and older 802.11b equipment? What distances
were you able to obtain? How well did it penetrate walls?
Posted by: voisine | January 18, 2003 01:30 AM
The links to other manufacturers' cards seem good for PC users, but not for the Mac desktop user who wants 802.11g. No sign of Mac support for wireless PCI cards from Belkin, Linksys or D-Link... My dual G4 is only 4 months old, and I'll be paying it off for a while to come.
Posted by: ChuckEye | January 18, 2003 03:21 AM
A good article about the new technology. Thanks. Too bad I just bought a LinkSys BEFW11S4 about 5 weeks ago. I wonder if Circuit City will allow me to trade up?
One thing that is a bit confusing. Apple says that they will not produce a G card for the older laptops. But the article says that other companies either have G cards now or will shortly. Will those work in the older Mac laptops? If so, how can they get past the limitations that Apple claims? If the bus speed is a problem in Macs, might it not also be a problem in other systems?
Posted by: huckleup | January 18, 2003 04:52 AM
Chuckeye, Belkin is promising Mac drivers for their hardware as we note in the article. I didn't see that they were promising just PC Card support; they make a PC and PCI Card.
Huckleup, it's a subtle point, but the AirPort Card works in a separate, slower bus than the PC Card slot in PowerBooks. The limitation has to do with choices Apple made when putting a PC Card-like slot into all Macs to handle the AirPort Card. The PC Card slot in PowerBooks can run at full speed, which is higher than 54 Mbps, although I don't know its top speed.
Posted by: Glenn Fleishman | January 18, 2003 09:02 AM
Any idea if Apple will support WPA when it becomes available?
Posted by: Jeff | January 18, 2003 10:48 AM