Rumor: Airport Upgradable?

[arn]

http://www.itsthebomb.com/

Apple apparently has a piece of software available only to internal employees which allows original versions of Apple's AirPort cards to be upgraded via an application to be "re-revved" to support the faster (54mbps) speeds offered by AirPort Extreme base stations

sounds pretty unbelievable to me...

arn

 

[Stelliform]

I would be happy with an airport extreme card that fit in my current TiBook. However, if it is true, I would be one happpy camper.

 

[Rower_CPU]

Yeah, sounds like wishful thinking to me.

Anybody people with in-depth knowledge of how .b and .g hardware works to say if this is truly possible?

 

[NicoMan]

It was always one of the possible scenarios happening when upgrading wireless networks from 802.11b to 802.11g. Now is that possible on Apple hardware? I wouldn' bet on it.

One sure thing is that, if it is true, I understand that Apple wouldn't want to make it public knowledge; they still need to sell new hardware. But on the other hand, all the lines that haven't been updated yet to Airport Extreme (along with Bluetooth, etc...) are bound to suffer because people are going to be waiting for upgrades that are felt to be coming soon.

Anyway, if it is true, it is huge...

Nicoman

 

[peterjhill]

Originally posted by Rower_CPU
Yeah, sounds like wishful thinking to me.

Anybody people with in-depth knowledge of how .b and .g hardware works to say if this is truly possible?

802.11b uses digital spread spectrum and 802.11g uses orthangonal frequency division multiplexing. What does that mean? It means they use two different methods to encode the data. Depending on what is in the airport cards, it might be possible. They would have to reprogram the cards. I doubt that it is possible, or else we would have heard about the lucent/proxim cards being flash upgradable also.