Airport Extreme Base Station & PPC G5

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Airport Extreme Base Station & PPC G5

I'm confused by the posts. Why not 811n with a PPC? Our 1.8 dual processor G5 has an airport extreme card, we just haven't ordered a base station yet.

Also, we held off on upgrading to Tiger and thought we'd wait on the airport extreme since Leopard was so close to release. But now, with the delay, that's going to be very inconvenient. We don't want to purchase Tiger for just a few months worth of use. Anyone come up with a work around?

Can we use the base station with 10.3.9? We do have a notebook PC with Windows XP. Could we use that to install the base station until Leopard is released? But then would we have to connect to the laptop or could we still connect to the G5?

PowerMac G5 1.8 1G memory, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Apr 15, 2007 10:01 AM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

82,941 points

Apr 15, 2007 11:39 AM in response to mnme

Welcome to Apple Discussions!

802.11n requires a bus of at least 100 Mbps if not higher for the speeds it can do. 802.11g is about 30 Mbps. The Intel Core 2 Duo Macs are the only ones who as happenstance would have it were endowed with either a wireless card that had the bandwidth to be upgraded, included such a card that already was upgraded, or included a port to such a card. The PowerMac G5 though has a PCI slot which is fast enough, and you might find on http://www.macwireless.com/ or http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/ a PCI card that fits the bill. You can also hook up a third party gigabit ethernet router that has 802.11n access built-in for 802.11n connectivity to your PowerMac G5, as your PowerMac G5 has gigabit ethernet.

Leopard recently was announced not to be released until October on the Apple Statement on this page:

http://www.apple.com/hotnews/

So yes, you can use the new 802.11n base station, but it won't be 802.11n speeds unless you get a third party 802.11n card or base station. The existing 802.11n base station from Apple only has 10/100 ethernet ports, and therefore won't exceed 100 Mbps, which theoretically is possible on an all 802.11n network.

No need to purchase Tiger unless the third party upgrade options say it is necessary.

As for worrying about Leopard, no one knows yet whether everything that is Tiger compatible will be Leopard compatible. With each upgrade some software breaks because of its poor coding and spec changes. So worrying about the future really is not worth it at this point. Others will have to play catch up before you can upgrade anyway!

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