AirPort Blog

couldn't they just do the reincoding in software? the G4 CPU does have altivec, wich if i'm not mistaken is designed for this kind of thing.

so apple does some kind of firmware patch that _bypases_ the older silicon and uses the CPU for that purpase instead. sure you still don't get the 54 mbps, and you slow down the rest of the computer, but that hasn't stoped the billions of WinModems flooding the market ;)

The short answer is "no." The long answer is, the radio is hardware, not software. You can mess around with firmware and host-side encoding as much as you want, but you still have to have a mechanism that takes the bits and puts them out on the radio using a digital-to-analog system.

The problem isn't the bus in terms of encoding the data: it's the radio. And the bus runs at, I think 20 Mbps, so there's no flavor of 802.11g that's slow enough to take advantage of, even if you could do it.

I've read the IEEE meeting minutes and had innumerable conversations with chip and hardware vendors, and there's no way to change the radio's basic function.

In the future, this will be different: software-defined radio (SDR) should allow a much greater range of software-into-radio changes that might obviate new silicon.

The same is true, by the way, with the security update. WPA is designed to work with existing silicon: the cryptographic circuitry. The 802.11i standard includes additional features that require new silicon (or possibly host-based processing), but WPA is limited to things that can be handled through firmware updates.

Even though I don't know the details of the ATA bus that connects the airport cards, it's hard to believe the throughput argument isn't bunk. You won't get 54 Mbit/s from an 802.11g card, more like 20 Mbit/s. This is 2.5 Mbyte/s, which is only slightly more than the bandwidth of the original PC/XT bus. Nice marketing argument, but I'm not sure it survives technical scrutiny.
(I do accept that the investment to design and build an airport ATA style card for 802.11g probably cannot be justified. Too bad.)

Fritz, that's a great point, but I think it assumes that the processing happens on the card with no host-based component, which I don't think would be possible. But I could be wrong.

CCK stands for Complementary Code Keying.

Do take a look at this thread over on our discussion forum, where I posted a paraphrase from a highly technical friend about why the AirPort slot won't work for 802.11g well. I don't have the technical expertised to evaluate it, but my friend writes drivers for wireless networking cards and builds her own machines from scratch, so I tend to believe her.

http://wireless-starter-kit.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=51

Hi all - I'm the webmaster of itsthebomb.com, where this rumour originated. I was told this info over the phone by an Apple Certified Engineer (I was talking to Apple UK, no less) and he told me this in no uncertain terms. I'm not sure why he would lie? ???

I don't think an Apple Certified Engineer would have inside knowledge of future hardware plans of this magnitude. Apple doesn't even reveal to its employees future hardware updates until they happen, often, unless the employees are involved in designing the software and hardware.

I think the person you spoke to was just making it up, speculating, passing it off as news. Who, in their right mind, would disclose this to someone outside of Apple? Apple employees have been fired left and right for releasing information they weren't supposed to.

And then there's the reality of it: the VP of hardware told Adam and I -- NO AIRPORT CARD UPDATE. On the record. He's never lied to us in the past, and if plans were up in the air, he would have told us Apple hadn't decided yet or was withholding news. They've done that before.

Then there's the reality of the CardBus problem: why redesign the Apple AirPort Card when you might be able to eke a tiny performance increase, if that? Even with Adam's additional info (see his comment just above), it still seems unlikely that you'd get more than a maybe 10% increase in throughput because the 802.11g card wouldn't be able to handle 54 Mbps -> 20 Mbps, but would rather have to be locked at a < 54 Mbps speed so it would overflow the bus. Thus that card couldn't get Wi-Fi certification, either.

Okay - thanks for giving me the real facts. I'll talk to the webmaster of Apple X and tell him that it's false, and I'll take it off my site as well. =)

It's obvious to me that the old PCCard-like Airport slots won't take Airport Extreme modules.

But... Some avenues leap to mind.

First, the Airport Extreme module looks to me like a mini PCI device. If I'm right, then it should be possible to simply install it in a miniPCI->PCI adapter and shove it into a desktop mac. The Linksys WMP-11 leaps to mind. Just unsolder and remove the RFI shield and you find that the whole thing really is just a mini PCI adapter with a mini PCI 802.11b module. The only tricky part will be retrofitting the antenna plug.

The Linksys WPC54G (a Cardbus 802.11g adapter) is also a Broadcom device, and cardbus is a lot like PCI (from the driver's perspective). I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to edit the Airport Extreme Info.plist file and "teach" the driver about the WPC54G. I'm betting this is both possible and easy.

Apple's VP of hardware told Adam and I that the card slot is not mini-PCI but uses many of its attributes. Normal mini-PCI cards will not work in the slot. The AirPort Card's PC Card slot actually reversed two pins in the card, making it hard (but not impossible) to insert other cards. Also, the antenna connector was unique.

Sure enough, I got my AirportExtreme card in the mail today, and it isn't anything like the miniPCI connector on the WMP-11.

More disturbingly, the box didn't come with any software, and there does not appear to be any recent updates on Apple's site. So I am concerned. Either the AE driver will come with 10.2.4 or the current driver is supposed to work with Airport Extreme cards.

If anyone out there has AirportExtreme working, please post the relevant portions of the output from ioreg and kextstat.

Why did you get a card without an appropriate machine? I'm assuming all capable machines have the software preinstalled, and I'm guessing it's 10.2.4 (whenever that comes).

I got the card because A> I thought I could shoehorn it into a miniPCI adapter (I was disappointed), and B> I thought it would come with a driver CD, and I hope to shoehorn the driver's Info.plist file into talking to my WPC-54G card so as to get AirportExtreme on my TiBook.

I hope 10.2.4 delivers an AE kext. If it doesn't, I'll be very disappointed.

Huzzah! It works! I "found" the AppleAirPort2.kext and with a simple hack on the Info.plist, my WPC54G shows up as en2. My weblog at http://www.kfu.com/~nsayer/mac/ has the details.

In response to Glenn Fleishman's post about original AirPort cards:
1) Original AirPort card slots support Orinoco silver and gold wireless cards in both OS 9 and OS X. How does this fit with the supposed "pin reversal" you mention? (i.e. Orinoco wireless cards will work in an AirPort card slot-the attached antennas make them a bad fit, but they work)

2) The AirPort card antenna connector is the same as on all Orinoco based wireless PC Cards - the "MC Card" connector.

Per the point #1: Is it actually correct that the Orinoco cards do work with the AirPort card slot? I thought it was the same technology, different pin out.