It will probably come as no surprise that a common request from our clients is to help them set up a wireless local area network (WLAN). During the course of this work, we have met a few compatibility problems with third party wireless access points (WAPs).
Unfortunately, Mac users are a very small part of the user base of most manufacturers of wireless equipment (apart from Apple, of course), so very often the manufacturer's data sheets give no clue as to whether their equipment will be compatible with Macs or not.There does not seem to be a definitive list anywhere of which WAPs will or will not work with the Airport wireless cards that are typically installed by Mac users, so this page summarizes what we know on the subject in the hope that readers will share their experiences with the many WAPs out there that are not on the list below.
The information provided here is not meant to replace the manufacturer's data sheets or reviews and so on, but to supplement them. There are many other factors to consider when choosing a WAP: range, reliability, ease of configuration and price for example, but none of these things matter if the WAP does not work with your Mac.
A Wireless Access Point is a device that joins a wireless network to a wired one. In the simplest terms, it takes all data packets off the air and puts them on the wired network and vice versa. The WAP is the most basic device that provides this capability. In addition, many manufacturers have smarter devices based on the WAP that provide routing capabilities, DHCP, firewalls, built-in hubs/switches and so on.
If you have any devices (routers, printers, fileservers, ...) on your wired LAN that you need to access from a wireless-equipped Mac, you will need either a WAP or a smarter device with a built-in WAP.
The two problems that we have come across are lack of AppleTalk support and incompatibilities in the implementation of WEP.
AppleTalk is mainly used for file-sharing on older versions of the MacOS (OS 8 and older), and for printing to older PostScript printers such as LaserWriters. In addition, some Mac applications use AppleTalk to register a serial number on the network and many older, network-capable applications (shared calendars, ISDN Manager, network fax servers, backup servers etc) used AppleTalk for communications.
In general, if you only have newer Macs capable of running Mac OS9 or Mac OSX, you probably do not require AppleTalk support. However, it doesn't hurt to have AppleTalk support and all other things being equal, you may as well pick a WAP that supports it.
WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy and allows traffic on the wireless LAN to be encrypted. One of joys of wireless that it is a broadcast medium and while that is very convenient it also means that anyone with a receiver (i.e. a laptop with a wireless card) can "tune in" and see all the data you are sending over the WLAN. That guy sitting in the car-park with a laptop could be filling in his travel expenses or he could be capturing passwords that you send as you login to various services over the WLAN.
WEP provides some measure of protection since all traffic between your Mac and the WAP will be encrypted. Alas! WEP is a very weak encryption method and is easily broken: if you capture enough traffic, a statistical analysis can reveal the encryption key (see the WLAN Security FAQ for more information). Nevertheless, it is better than nothing and it will deter casual opportunistic capture of your wireless traffic.
The Airport utility on the Mac takes the password you entered, then generates a hexadecimal key from it using an algorithm that may be different from that used in the 3rd party WAP. To overcome this, either
That simply means that we have no information about it. If you know for sure that your WAP does or does not work with a Mac, please tell us about it.