802.11ac with EW-7811USC/UTC/UAC for PPC Macs?

[randomshinichi]

It seems people have recommended the EW-7811UN - looks nice and convenient, but I couldn't resist checking out the newer 802.11ac capable dongles - I see Mac OS X 10.4 support!

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Any reason those haven't been recommended so far?

 

[weckart]

Any reason those haven't been recommended so far?

I suspected that it was 10.4 Intel only so downloaded the package. The kext is Universal, surprisingly enough. There is an ac package of indeterminate architecture and a Network Utility to connect to networks with the driver, which is also Universal. If you want to test it for us...

 

[randomshinichi]

2.4GHz works very well, achieved 150Mbps. for some reason 5GHz and ac doesn't work. Maybe 5GHz and ac support is up to the OS and not at the driver level? Anyways with 1 stream it should have been able to get 433Mbps if it used 5Ghz ac...

on an unrelated note, I did not know routers needed rebooting too - I bought the Edimax dongle because my iBook's Airport Extreme could connect but couldn't get an IP, so I thought it was some hardware failure. Then I started having other issues with the Edimax dongle and decided to reboot my Mikrotik router - and my iBook G4's Airport Extreme could get an IP again! So it turns out I don't need it so much after all.

But it is reassuring to see these companies still support old OSs.

 

[Amethyst1]

on an unrelated note, I did not know routers needed rebooting too

I have to reboot my router a couple of times a month - sometimes it drops the DSL connection, sometimes the WiFi vanishes. It's in a tight spot so heat may be a factor.

 

[eyoungren]

I have to reboot my router a couple of times a month - sometimes it drops the DSL connection, sometimes the WiFi vanishes. It's in a tight spot so heat may be a factor.

Mine has to be rebooted every six months or so and sometimes when my ISP changes my IP address. It sucks because sometimes it takes the switch down with it, which means I have to unplug and plug that back in too.

The worst is when I have to reset the cable modem. That usually requires resetting the router, the switch AND the femtocell (a box from my cell carrier serving 4G/LTE).

 

[2984839]

In my experience, consumer routers never need rebooting--they need to be placed directly in the garbage can.

 

[salamanderjuice]

In my experience, consumer routers never need rebooting--they need to be placed directly in the garbage can.

Lol. My Apple Airport Express AC has been flawless. I've never needed to reboot it because its acting up. It has flaws, like you need an Apple device of a newish vintage to configure it, limited options and only has USB 2.0 and 3 ethernet jacks. But it has worked well for the past 6 years I've had it. Probably the best most trouble free Apple product I've owned tbh.

 

[randomshinichi]

In my experience, consumer routers never need rebooting--they need to be placed directly in the garbage can.

To he fair I did install a RouterOS beta on the Mikrotik.... it probably isn't the same category as those routers you speak of!

 

[speli]

2.4GHz works very well, achieved 150Mbps. for some reason 5GHz and ac doesn't work. Maybe 5GHz and ac support is up to the OS and not at the driver level? Anyways with 1 stream it should have been able to get 433Mbps if it used 5Ghz ac...

on an unrelated note, I did not know routers needed rebooting too - I bought the Edimax dongle because my iBook's Airport Extreme could connect but couldn't get an IP, so I thought it was some hardware failure. Then I started having other issues with the Edimax dongle and decided to reboot my Mikrotik router - and my iBook G4's Airport Extreme could get an IP again! So it turns out I don't need it so much after all.

But it is reassuring to see these companies still support old OSs.

I have no idea how you got it working! i bought 3 7811utc units specifically for my old macs running 10.4 (mini G4) and 10.5 (2 powermac G5s) and every single driver i install from the manufacturer and forum posts either dont open the wireless utility or dont recognize the dongle, or, in worst case, the ones that i have received from Edimax crashes the computer either when i attach the dongle or when the wireless connection is established. The one you linked also just crashes all 3 of my old computers constantly.

 

[B S Magnet]

I have no idea how you got it working! i bought 3 7811utc units specifically for my old macs running 10.4 (mini G4) and 10.5 (2 powermac G5s) and every single driver i install from the manufacturer and forum posts either dont open the wireless utility or dont recognize the dongle, or, in worst case, the ones that i have received from Edimax crashes the computer either when i attach the dongle or when the wireless connection is established. The one you linked also just crashes all 3 of my old computers constantly.

Have you, by chance, tried this specific build of the driver for the EW-7811Un (for your Leopard Macs)?

 

[speli]

Have you, by chance, tried this specific build of the driver for the EW-7811Un (for your Leopard Macs)?

Yes, after installing it, it didnt recognize the dongle. In the meantime, i got it working, i had to do a 2.4 only network and they all work since then with OPs drivers. the operating system cant recognize 5ghz so it panics when it tries, 2,4 works steadily at 72mbps, which is quite slow, but better then lan cables hanging around. also, the mac mini g4's wifi speed is double with the dongle then with airport. i would have loved to use them at 5ghz speeds but it seems i cant.

 

[B S Magnet]

Yes, after installing it, it didnt recognize the dongle. In the meantime, i got it working, i had to do a 2.4 only network and they all work since then with OPs drivers. the operating system cant recognize 5ghz so it panics when it tries, 2,4 works steadily at 72mbps, which is quite slow, but better then lan cables hanging around. also, the mac mini g4's wifi speed is double with the dongle then with airport. i would have loved to use them at 5ghz speeds but it seems i cant.

I’m glad you at least got it working in some capacity — even if you can’t access the 5 GHz band.

As memory serves, there probably aren’t going to be many options to speak of for accessing the 5 GHz 802.11n-spec range of frequencies with one of these USB dongles on the PowerPC Macs. This may speak to limited driver back-support for Universal Binary/PPC Macs, as a lot of these chipsets by Edimax/RealTek/etc. came into being long after Apple had moved over to Intel Macs and writing drivers was prioritized for those.

When I last set up an EW-7811Un USB dongle (the EW-7811Un is probably an earlier iteration of the EW-7811Utc you have, which I wasn’t aware of until your mention above), it was that chipset connected to an iBook G4 with the specific driver version I linked to earlier. I remember it took a lot of trial and error, along with digging through Archive-dot-org’s captures of the Edimax downloads page (to try out earlier or later minor revisions of the drivers), before I found that one was able to actually work in Leopard. Finding that combo was important enough to add to The Leopard Thread wikipost (along with another Edimax product for PCI/PCI-X Power Macs), in hopes that it would empower others to avoid the trial and error headache I dealt with.

Anyway, thanks for the update.

 

[speli]

I’m glad you at least got it working in some capacity — even if you can’t access the 5 GHz band.

As memory serves, there probably aren’t going to be many options to speak of for accessing the 5 GHz 802.11n-spec range of frequencies with one of these USB dongles on the PowerPC Macs. This may speak to limited driver back-support for Universal Binary/PPC Macs, as a lot of these chipsets by Edimax/RealTek/etc. came into being long after Apple had moved over to Intel Macs and writing drivers was prioritized for those.

When I last set up an EW-7811Un USB dongle (the EW-7811Un is probably an earlier iteration of the EW-7811Utc you have, which I wasn’t aware of until your mention above), it was that chipset connected to an iBook G4 with the specific driver version I linked to earlier. I remember it took a lot of trial and error, along with digging through Archive-dot-org’s captures of the Edimax downloads page (to try out earlier or later minor revisions of the drivers), before I found that one was able to actually work in Leopard. Finding that combo was important enough to add to The Leopard Thread wikipost (along with another Edimax product for PCI/PCI-X Power Macs), in hopes that it would empower others to avoid the trial and error headache I dealt with.

Anyway, thanks for the update.

Hahah, thats exactly where i found it! Looked into the UN but now its ‘v2’ which is not compatible with PPC, and ‘v1’ was more expensive than this UTC one. UN mentioned in the thread is 150mbit, i looked around, most of them are too old to be sold now, but i found this guy, the UTC, 600mbit stated, but promising 433mbit and i was hoping it will be faster - and also cheaper - then the UN. It actually did 433mbit even in the G4 mini, right before crashing…Well, im stuck with 72mbit, but still more than nothing, crashing computers and long lan cables. Thanks for this thread, it was good to see someone else is also playing with these still! Now time to fix up the rams because both G5s decided only to recognize half capacity of the specifically G5 compatible kingston kta g5400/1g rams, so its time to find used KVRX64C3A plates and get owc 250ssds for them, and also an m2ssd for the g4 mini with its compatible adapter, there is always something to fidget on with these ??‍♂️

 

[speli]

 

[speli]

As a bonus here’s a pic of the g4mini doing 433mbits right when crashing, its connected to a 55inch tv so i only managed to take an actual picture instead of a screenshot, you know, like grandmas do, hahaha

 

[Macbookprodude]

So, if it works why the kernel panic ? Was that because of your ram in the G5 ?

 

[speli]

So, if it works why the kernel panic ? Was that because of your ram in the G5 ?

As far as i know leopard is not compatible with 5ghz, it didnt exist then really, it only knew it up until wifi b/g. Probably thats why. I might be wrong, the mini is 1.5ghz 1gb ram, the g5s are 2.0ghz dual from 03, with 6 and 3.5gb ram, 8gb soon. You think i should try again and see is it panics?

 

[weckart]

As far as i know leopard is not compatible with 5ghz, it didnt exist then really, it only knew it up until wifi b/g. Probably thats why. I might be wrong, the mini is 1.5ghz 1gb ram, the g5s are 2.0ghz dual from 03, with 6 and 3.5gb ram, 8gb soon. You think i should try again and see is it panics?

Even Tiger eventually got support for 802.11n. My G5 Mac Pro runs with an AirPort card from a MacBook on a PCIe carrier. The drivers for it were there under Leopard.

 

[speli]

Even Tiger eventually got support for 802.11n. My G5 Mac Pro runs with an AirPort card from a MacBook on a PCIe carrier. The drivers for it were there under Leopard.

Okay, but whats speeds are we looking at here, im currently at 72mbps, which is, on 2.4 is above G, does yours accept 5hgz and do 200plus, or are you stuck at somewhere like me?

 

[weckart]

Okay, but whats speeds are we looking at here, im currently at 72mbps, which is, on 2.4 is above G, does yours accept 5hgz and do 200plus, or are you stuck at somewhere like me?

Not at home so can't confirm but I've never cared about whether it was hooked up to 5GHz or not as websites that I could browse under Leopard were usually the bottleneck.

[EDIT] Back home now and can confirm that my PowerMac G5 has no problems connecting to my router at 5GHz under Leopard 10.5.8. Speeds won't be fantastic as the G5 sits in a room, which is a bit of a WiFi deadspot so I have switched it to ethernet over Powerline for the moment. Might get a mesh system sometime.

 

[B S Magnet]

Even Tiger eventually got support for 802.11n. My G5 Mac Pro runs with an AirPort card from a MacBook on a PCIe carrier. The drivers for it were there under Leopard.

The IEEE 802.11n draft was published right around the time of Apple’s transition to Intel. It is also why, at least with the earliest MacBooks, the AirPort Extreme card within was ready for the 802.11n draft standard, but were shipped to customers without the protocol activated in the firmware (and why Apple soon offered a firmware update — initially, for a fee — to enable 802.11n functionality on those early cards. As Tiger was the current OS between April 2005 and October 2007, it’s not a surprise that 802.11n support at the OS level was integrated into a Tiger update.

As for IEEE 802.11ac, it’s a bit different, in that its drafting was in later 2013 — which means support at the OS level for Macs didn’t emerge until probably Mavericks (and someone correct me here), maybe the final 10.8.5 Mountain Lion update. Then there was an update by the IEEE in 2016 which changed standards for max downlink/download speeds.

[I have no idea whether manually moving Frameworks and/or kexts from the first iterations of OS X with 802.11ac support, into earlier versions of OS X, would actually work for Apple’s Broadcom PCIe wifi cards, or whether this would kernel panic the system. This is something I want to look into at some point with an adapter, a later Apple Broadcom wifi card (like those in the post-2013 iMacs), and a test Intel Mac (with an internal PCIe slot, i.e., pre-unibody era) running, say, Lion or Snow Leopard, using kexts written for later Broadcom wifi cards with 802.11ac support. My hopes are not high.]

So for getting IEEE 802.11ac to work with a dongle, the drivers not only have to know about the 802.11ac side of things (on the protocol end), but also must be compatible with the right version of OS X (on the software end). As far as I’m aware, the characteristics of using 802.11ac — like using both 2.4 and 5GHz simultaneously — were probably never written for the last of the third-party PowerPC drivers (such as Realtek and Edimax), circa the late ’00s/early ’10s, because at the time they were written, bi-frequency wifi functionality hadn’t been established by the IEEE, whereas IEEE 802.11n could use either of 2.4 or 5 GHz.

 

[weckart]

The IEEE 802.11n draft was published right around the time of Apple’s transition to Intel. It is also why, at least with the earliest MacBooks, the AirPort Extreme card within was ready for the 802.11n draft standard, but were shipped to customers without the protocol activated in the firmware (and why Apple soon offered a firmware update — initially, for a fee — to enable 802.11n functionality on those early cards. As Tiger was the current OS between April 2005 and October 2007, it’s not a surprise that 802.11n support at the OS level was integrated into a Tiger update.

This bit is true and who back then can forget the hoohah about having to pay extra to unlock hardware that you had already paid for? I remember the excuse was something about accounting periods and tax thereon, which was really Apple's problem. Apple decided the easiest solution was to shift it to the customer. Not cute considering the cost of Apple hardware then and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on these very forum pages.

Having said that, all this really applied to Intel hardware, as PPC hardware, as sold by Apple, stopped at 802.11g and there was no obvious way to update the AirPort hardware to 802.11n except in a roundabout way via Cardbus, USB or PCIe in any of Apple's PPC computers, none of which would require Apple to issue or even develop any kexts for them.

The support for Tiger PPC came later (and somewhat obscurely) in a 2007 updated release of Tiger Server 10.4.7, which was the sole retail edition of Tiger issued in a Universal release. The update helpfully contained PPC kexts for the Broadcom BCM4311 chip. Why it did, is anyone's guess but that was the kext to work with if you wanted AirPort 802.11n on PPC hardware under Tiger. Otherwise, you had to rely on third party USB dongles, which had their own drivers and AirPort type network software to manage them.

 

[B S Magnet]

Having said that, all this really applied to Intel hardware, as PPC hardware, as sold by Apple, stopped at 802.11g and there was no obvious way to update the AirPort hardware to 802.11n except in a roundabout way via Cardbus, USB or PCIe in any of Apple's PPC computers, none of which would require Apple to issue or even develop any kexts for them.

While true, the CardBus route for 802.11n (for larger PowerBook G4s, at least) didn’t require Apple to do anything special from their end by the time of Leopard, as their AirPort Framework/kext for Broadcom wifi support included several Broadcom variants, including the chip set used in a 802.11n CardBus solution (BCM4321) which has been what my PowerBook’s been running for these last few years — meaning, AirPort sees and treats the CardBus as device-native (which means being able to use the usual AirPort menubar icon).

EDIT: I think you were just describing this, but from the origins in Tiger 10.4.7.

 

[weckart]

which has been what my PowerBook’s been running for these last few years — meaning, AirPort sees and treats the CardBus as device-native (which means being able to use the usual AirPort menubar icon).

Is yours the Buffalo card? I was on the lookout for that a few years ago but the only one I could ever find was something like $70+ on eBay.com, which after shipping and taxes to the UK priced itself out of consideration. Not sure you could dig one up now, even though it was never a Mac card, so not necessarily that rare an object.

 

[B S Magnet]

Is yours the Buffalo card? I was on the lookout for that a few years ago but the only one I could ever find was something like $70+ on eBay.com, which after shipping and taxes to the UK priced itself out of consideration. Not sure you could dig one up now, even though it was never a Mac card, so not necessarily that rare an object.

Nope. It’s the Linksys WPC600N.