Quiet Blog
I know that this blog has been quiet again for the last few months, but there's been precious little AirPort-related news. Firmware is stable. The new Intel Macs seem to work fine with Wi-Fi. And no new products have appeared.
I expect this to change soon. The latest revision to Wi-Fi, the 802.11n standard working its way through a standards process, has already started appearing in early draft versions this month. 802.11n can boost the raw speed of Wi-Fi from the 54 Mbps of 802.11g (AirPort Extreme) and 802.11a to 600 Mbps in the most expensive version that has all optional elements included.
In the "slowest" version of 802.11n, expect a raw data rate of 150 Mbps and a net throughput of about 100 Mbps or better, nearly four times faster than plain 802.11g. Now Apple's AirPort Extreme and other manufacturers' enhanced versions of 802.11g can deliver rates of 30 to 50 Mbps depending on equipment and interoperability. The pioneer in multiple-in/multiple-out (MIMO) antenna systems, Airgo, has delivered chips that appear in Buffalo and NetGear equipment that already provide 100 Mbps or better real throughput, but only at a high cost and among like devices.
Because Apple was an early adopter of 802.11g, and because it's eschewed the proprietary and odd extensions to 802.11g that have appeared in intervening years--they adopted the more generally compatible improvements--they're ideally poised to make the leap from AirPort Extreme to AirPort FreakingFast or whatever super-duper name they'll assign to it.
My expectation is that Apple will announce the new technology at or before WWDC this August because the final draft of the standard should be finished or close to it before then, and at least four chipmakers will have been producing draft chipsets for months and worked out the bugs. Interoperability should actually be fairly decent, or achievable via firmware upgrades.
I predict that Apple won't offer any 802.11n products that work in existing AirPort Extreme slots. Rather, they'll only use a PCI ExpressCard style interface. (The onboard Wi-Fi in the first Intel Macs use this architecture.) So don't get your hopes up about Apple helping you to speed up a G4 or G5 Mac of any kind.