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Viewing Wi-Fi Details in Snow Leopard

In Snow Leopard, hold down the Option key before clicking the AirPort menu. Doing so reveals additional technical details including which standards, speeds, and frequencies you're using to connect, as well as what's in use by other networks. With the Option key held down and with a network already joined, the AirPort menu reveals seven pieces of information: the PHY Mode, the MAC (Media Access Control) address, the channel and band in use, the security method that's in use, the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indication) measurement, the transmit rate, and the MCS Index. In Leopard, some, but not all, of these details are revealed by Option-clicking the AirPort menu.

Submitted by
Doug McLean

 

 

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Correction: Slow Down There, iCowboy

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We got ahead of ourselves last week in "iPhone Seeks to Redefine the Mobile Phone" (2007-01-15) when we said that the iPhone contained the in-progress 802.11n flavor of wireless networking. In fact, it's merely 802.11g, the same as in the original AirPort Extreme.

What can we say? All the hype about 802.11n at Macworld Expo, with the Apple TV and new AirPort Extreme Base Station must have gotten to us. The iPhone should be capable of nearly 25 Mbps of real throughput in the best circumstances, versus the 100 Mbps from 802.11n.

And, while we had heard that no Intel processor was inside, it turns out that that's a very fine point indeed. Multiple sources, including Intel, stated that Apple is using an XScale processor from Marvell, a chipmaker that bought its embedded processor division mere months ago from... Intel. (The source is in Italian, but the Intel exec said, roughly: "It's not ours, but Marvell's, the company to which we sold the business that included the XScale architecture.")

 

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