Cheap Wi-Fi packages started showing up on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Best Buy, and they sold in remarkable numbers: 12 million units last year, and on pace to double that this year. What's extraordinary about this boom is that it's an authentic grassroots phenomenon, happening in the home even faster than in the office.
Companies are cautious about the security implications of a network that goes through walls and into the street, but most home users are too dazzled to care. Stream video from the couch, surf in bed, email in the backyard, all at lightning speed. How many other technologies leave even hardened gadget vets grinning with amazement? And that's just the beginning.
We are starting to see the next phase of the Wi-Fi movement: the rise of public networks. Already there are thousands of open-access hot spots across the country, everywhere from Starbucks and airports to city parks.
Others are ad hoc community nets, such as neighboring apartment dwellers using Wi-Fi to share a broadband connection. Tens of thousands more are accidental, leaking out of private homes or offices and often free for passersby to hitchhike on.
With prices for Wi-Fi equipment continuing to plummet, it's just a matter of time before the scattering of Wi-Fi dots on city maps grow dense and then overlap. In the years ahead, Wi-Fi will become a universal standard, found everywhere in the electronics world. It will show up in consumer electronics devices, from videogame consoles to music players.
Cell phones will have it, as will PDAs and digital cameras. Any PC bought in a year or so will instantly become the hub of a wireless network, simply by turning it on. The numbers will quickly reach true mass-market levels: an estimated 99 million people with Wi-Fi by , according to Gartner. All of this amounts to an inversion of the usual adoption cycle, where big companies must build communications infrastructures to encourage consumers to jump on new technologies as was the case with cell phones.
Wi-Fi is becoming ubiquitous for its own reasons. The question is, what networks and services will arise to capitalize on it?
Rather than "build it and they will come," the mantra is "they're already here, now build it! But build what, exactly? Here are the next four big fronts in the Wi-Fi invasion. Making it work everywhere. Today the gap between a cell phone experience and Wi-Fi is huge. With a phone, it's usually safe to assume you've got a signal; with Wi-Fi it's almost always safe to assume you don't.
Even in the presence of a hot spot and there are few good ways to know you are, short of opening your laptop and "sniffing" for it , odds are you won't be able to log on, because it's either a private network or a commercial one that requires a subscription. Even places that advertise access, such as hotels and airports, often have it just in the lobby or at certain gates.
Several companies are working on key chains, cards, and pendants that will glow in the presence of a Wi-Fi signal, which is a start especially if they are smart enough to identify only the networks you can log on to. Cell phones could do the same. Companies such as Boingo and Cometa are aiming to achieve this, but it's a big world out there. Expect a few more years of frustration. Unwiring the living room. Digital media, from MP3 to DVD, is taking over, but the equipment in most homes is still largely analog.
Consumer electronics makers have been unable to come up with a common digital standard to link gear, and even if they did, few consumers want to string networking cable under their couch.
Wi-Fi can break this logjam and become the common link that ties together music, video, and even phones around the house, automatically and effortlessly. Then the notion of a central entertainment server, which records TV, stores music and video, and plays it back on any screen in the house, will finally take off. Once the living room is a wirelessly networked digital media hub, the long-awaited era of Internet video may arrive, kicking broadband demand into high gear.
Using Wi-Fi to cross the last mile. As consumer electronics start to ship with wireless networking built in, demand will skyrocket for the broadband connections to make it all worthwhile. Which could be another opportunity for Wi-Fi. Currently, getting broadband at home is, at best, an uninspiring choice between the phone company and the cable company - if it's available at all. Wi-Fi hot spots mounted on lampposts or telephone poles, with directional antennas to extend their range and avoid congestion, could offer as good or better service.
And the economies of scale of a truly mainstream technology could make it far cheaper than other wireless options. Also, neighborhood Wi-Fi "umbrellas" could employ the miles of unused fiber-optic cable that are a legacy of the telecom bubble, effectively bridging the otherwise expensive "last mile" from the main telecom networks to individual homes.
Converging with the cell phone. Finally, once there's widespread Wi-Fi in the home, the neighborhood, and enough public spaces, wireless convergence starts to make sense. Today, it's not uncommon to find consumers who are fully wireless: a cell phone outside the home, cordless phones within, and a Wi-Fi network for data.
Yet, while some of these devices share the same frequencies cordless phones and Wi-Fi both use the 2. Bringing them together is just a matter of time.
Wi-Fi, especially in higher-speed incarnations, is as capable of transmitting voice as any cordless phone, and because calls travel over the Internet rather than over a phone network, they are far cheaper. By the same token, several companies are planning to add Wi-Fi to cell phones, allowing users to make calls over the Internet when in Wi-Fi range. The dream to emerge from this is a single device that moves seamlessly from home to road, using the best network available wherever it is.
It's this vision of convergence that has the smarter telcos reconsidering their 3G plans in light of the Wi-Fi boom. There are many parts that still must come together, but it is not hard to imagine a day when the Internet really is everywhere, just in different strengths and price tiers depending on the cost of the underlying infrastructure. Most of those would be Wi-Fi networks, with cell phone service as a seamless but costly fallback, like analog roaming is for digital phones today.
Wi-Fi is just a few years old - still in its first blush of success. No doubt some of the above will prove impractical, and problems from security to interference will arise to slow its growth. The history of WiFi is long and interesting. A ruling by the U. Federal Communications Commission released the ISM band for unlicensed use — these are frequencies in the 2.
These frequency bands are the same ones used by equipment such as microwave ovens and are subject to interference. The first wireless products were under the name WaveLAN. They are the ones credited with inventing Wi-Fi. The first version of the This was updated in with In , the Wi-Fi Alliance formed as a trade association to hold the Wi-Fi trademark under which most products are sold. The name Wi-Fi , commercially used at least as early as August , was coined by the brand-consulting firm Interbrand.
Interbrand also created the Wi-Fi logo. The yin-yang Wi-Fi logo indicates the certification of a product for interoperability. The original version of the standard IEEE The latter two radio technologies used microwave transmission over the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.
The The dramatic increase in throughput of Devices using Devices operating in the 2. Originally described as clause 17 of the specification, the OFDM waveform at 5. It has seen widespread worldwide implementation, particularly within the corporate workspace. While the original amendment is no longer valid, the term Since the 2. However, this high carrier frequency also brings a disadvantage: the effective overall range of Fortunately, manufacturers release patches to fix these holes.
But if the patch is not installed by the user, or their firmware is not updated to fix the issue, then they become vulnerable to an attack. As with most products, wireless routers have a product lifecycle. If the manufacturer is no longer releasing updates for your specific router, then each new vulnerability that is encountered from the moment your router went unsupported, is now a very real threat to your network.
WEP Wired Equivalent Privacy is the oldest wireless security protocol out of the three options and it has the most known security flaws. Digital Crave explains that combining this with a strong password is the most secure wireless protocol to go with. There are many other features that may not be available to older routers, including advanced firewalls, powerful parental controls, and content filtering.
Generally, the newer the technology, the faster the data rate will be. Chances are, when you set up your wireless network, it was for a single task. For example, allowing a laptop to access the internet without using a cable. As time has gone by and technology has advanced , there have been many new devices to enter the scene that can use your Wi-Fi network…smart TVs, tablets, gaming systems, and printers to name a few.
Older routers use older wireless standards: Whereas, newer routers use
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