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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1761
For Airport Extreme: Read 'Wireless G'
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
March 3rd 2003
The year of Wi-Fi?
Now that virtually everyone uses the word 'FireWire', you could almost forget that
vendors used to always advertise 'IEEE-1394'.
But Apple has branded its Wi-Fi solution 'Airport' from the beginning. Now, with
Cupertino's adoption of the 54Mb/ps 802.11g Wi-Fi standard, it's 'Airport Extreme'.
Since other PC manufacturers and peripheral makers can't use the registered trademark,
it's 'Wireless G' for the masses. But to confuse the issue further, that could refer
to either 802.11g, or the competing 802.11a.
The original Airport standard boasted 11Mb/ps and was based on 802.11b. Apple took a
slight risk announcing Airport Extreme based on the 802.11g standard at MWSF, as it
hadn't received certification. Recently, it did. But, like DVD-R/RW and DVD+RW, the
war's not quite over yet.
802.11a is being pushed by Intel and some other firms. While it boasts similar specs
to Airport Extreme, the key problem is that it is not backward-compatible with the
802.11b standard, which has been deployed widely in business, homes and schools.
The big news for both 802.11a and 802.11g is bandwidth: movies can be streamed
wirelessly without problems, whereas 802.11b is fairly pedestrian, particularly as
100bT ethernet networks become more and more common.
The article notes that Apple's Airport Extreme Base Station comes with an extra or two
the competiting LinkSys, like the USB port on the Base Station. For Apple, the pay-off
for entering the Wi-Fi market so early (1999) is potentially large: the market was
worth $1.7 billion, with predictions of closer to $3 billion by 2006. Apple has also
taken connectivity further, by integrating short-range Wi-Fi, BlueTooth, into its new
PowerBooks and Power Macs.
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