More stealth Airport upgrades?

We’ve already found out that the new Intel Macs feature an Airport chipset that supports the fallen-by-the-wayside standard 802.11a. We find out today that the chipsets also support proprietary speed boosting technologies present in Netgear and D-Link networking products. However, that’s only possible when running under Windows XP.

Ok, did the boot camp thing on my Macbook Pro. Well checking my internet connection (under XP), the driver on the Macbook is reporting 108mbps connection to my router.

MacBook Pro 2.0Ghz + 7200RPM HDD running Windows XP SP2 (via BootCamp) is reporting a 108Mbps connection to my D-Link DGL-4300 wireless gaming router.

It’s a little disappointing that Apple didn’t leverage this feature. However, in order for the benefit to be utilized, one would need to use something other than Apple wireless hardware, something we know Apple won’t do. Hopefully this will soon become a moot point when Apple decides to adopt 802.11n (which I would expect any day now). Apple’s been on the forefront of these wireless technologies and needs to stick there.