OrangeWare's Opens NetGear, Others to Mac OS X
OrangeWare is offering a trial version of its driver that supports Atheros's 802.11a and 802.11g chipsets used in equipment from D-Link, NetGear, and others. The driver works for 10 minutes and then requires a purchase; it's $15.
This is the first time I know of that you can use 802.11a on a Mac. 802.11a runs at 54 Mbps, but uses the 5 gigahertz (GHz) band; both 802.11b (AirPort) and 802.11g (AirPort Extreme) use the 2.4 GHz range of spectrum.
The opening paragraph on OrangeWare's site has several factual errors. They write, For several years now, Apple® users have chaffed at the issue that most wireless cards (CardBus and PCI) don’t work with Apple’s Airport® access points. Why is that? It’s because the Apple® client driver only works with the Broadcom chipset.
The Broadcom chipset has only been used since January 2003 with AirPort Extreme. From 1999 to 2003, Apple's AirPort used a Lucent (later Agere) chipset for which a few generic drivers were offered. The statement about wireless cards not working with Apple's access points is incorrect: they meant to say that you couldn't use non-Broadcom cards (a minority of the market) with a Mac.