Airport Express Delayed Again: Will iTV Be 802.11n?

• October 14th, 2006 | IPTV

According to AppleInsider, shipments of revised Aiport Extreme Base Stations have been pushed back from an expected ship-date some time in October to December.

“On the other hand, shipments of Apple’s revised AirPort Extreme base stations have been pushed back from “October” to “December.” No further information on this product was available.”

Apple had to pull the Airport Extreme Base Station from Europe because it did not meet new environmental regulations set down by the gadget-friendly folk in Brussels. And now we hear that it has been pushed back again. Strange.

Or is it? Remember that Apple will be launching their own set-top box (codenamed iTV) in Q1 2007. It’s going to be wireless and is designed to be the link between all your movies that you’ve legally downloaded (or maybe not) in iTunes and your TV. While it comes with a whole raft of inputs and connectivity, wired and wireless, most people are only interested in using it to stream media straight out of their media library and onto the screen.

But video is big, and there has been a lot of speculation recently that 802.11b/g would struggle to handle this amount of data in the world, especially when Apple plan on offering movies at 640 x 480, but will probably bump that up over time.

Add to this that Steve Jobs, during his Keynote speech at the Showtime event, said that iTV will use “802.11″, not 802.11b/g, just “802.11″. Very interesting indeed.

So to wrap it up, Apple may be pushing back the release of an updated Airport Extreme Base Station because it has been having manufacturing problems. Maybe they are struggling to meet the standards set out in the new EU environmental legislation. Or perhaps, just maybe, there’s a chance, that they’re waiting for MacWorld in January to release a new Airport Extreme Base Station with 802.11n alongside a renamed iTV.