14 DAY TRIAL // When Steve Jobs first showed the 'iTV,' there was a lot of speculation regarding the wireless capabilities of the device. Jobs only described it as being "802.11" and didn't clarify the matter of the exact protocol used. This led to a lot of questions regarding the upcoming 802.11n specification, which is still a long way from being finalized. Of course, at the time, people pointed to the fact that there is still a lot of time before the 'iTV' start shipping, and that there might still be time for Apple to get the technology into the box.
Interestingly enough, it looks like Apple is staying well ahead of the curve and might have already started adopting the draft protocol. MacRumors reports that one of its users, Peace, noticed that the wireless card in the new Core 2 Duo 20" iMac is identified as a 'Broadcom 802.11n Network Adapter' under the latest version of Vista. This is interesting, because the 802.11n capabilities of the device are not in any way recognized while running under OS X.
It looks like Apple is adopting the draft version of the protocol, but doing so in a hush-hush manner, for reasons that are probably their own. Because the specification has not yet been finalized, such an early adoption may cause interoperability issues when the protocol is finalized, however, that may not be until 2008. In the mean time, if Apple has adopted the draft protocol, it seems very likely that it will also be present in the 'iTV' when it does ship.