802.11G : From Draft to Standard Firmware Upgrade?

Posted:
in Future Apple Hardware edited January 2014
So when the IEEE finally passes 802.11G as a standard it may see a few revisions....do you guys expect that the Airport Extreme hardware can have its firmware flashed to correct for those revisions? Everyone knows that this was an early-adopter move by Apple, I'm just curious as to how big a deal this is....especially since there are some industry wags who are saying that 802.11a will be the ultimate victor in this particular little fight. I think that rev. b is pretty damned well established now and that other vendors/users would want to go with rev. g because of its backwards compatibility. I personally don't expect for there to be an overnight switch to 802.11G by hot spots around the world, but it would be an embarassing gaffe for Apple if things go kablooey here.



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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 4
    matsumatsu Posts: 6,558member
    I read somewhere that 802.11A is winning some major victories for North American autobile mobile information/connection standard. If so, it mightn't go away any time soon and may even come to supplant b/g as the standard of choice for "mobile" applications.



    Is there something about the 5Ghz band that would mak it better suited to swathing large areas (roadways etc) with a signal?



    Anyone?
  • Reply 2 of 4
    As an additional note: it seems like everyone jumping the 802.11g bandwagon BEFORE the standard was, well, standardized might also end up being problematic.



    <a href="http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/26038"; target="_blank">Story Link</a>



    I linked to the discussion thread, but the link to the article in question is above it.



    The bottom line of the article is that every company wanted to be first to market so that their own version of 802.11g became the "standard". Whatever the IEEE decides, someone's gonna be SOL.
  • Reply 3 of 4
    Something else that is interesting is that intel just decided to add in support for 802.11g in their chipsets (not on the market yet). They originally were going to only support a, but recently changed their plans to do a,b, and g (I assume the b is really just there because of g). Don't know if that means much, but if Intel has decided to also back the g camp, maybe it does have some staying power in the computer world.



    With all the existing hotspots being b, why woudl you choose to use a? It would not be compatible with any existing hotspots, so youcould only connect ot new ones. Seems stupid to me...
  • Reply 4 of 4
    cowerdcowerd Posts: 579member
    For many businesses 802.11a is emerging as a standard, so compatibility with 802.11b is not an issue. And IBM has released laptops with both 802.11a and 802.11b, so that's not really a problem either.
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