Entering a World Without Wires

In: Root » Electronics and communication » Wireless » Entering a World Without Wires

In this article

Understanding the 802.11 standard and Wi-Fi
How the Wi-Fi Alliance works
Why Wi-Fi is important, and its place in the world
Wi-Fi networks and how they work: the hundred-mile view
Hitting the road with Wi-Fi

Have you ever wanted to lounge on a beach chair at a fancy resort and surf the Internet? Connect and get your email in a coffee shop such as Starbucks, or one inside a Borders articlestore? Put together some computers in your home so that they can share files or access to the Internet without drilling holes or snaking snarled wires from one computer to another?
With Wi-Fi, you can do all these things, and more.
This article shows you how.
I don't assume you know anything about Wi-Fi, or about any of the related topics, such as how to set up a network of computers. You'll find everything you need to take your wireless computer on the road, and to set up a wireless network, right here between these pages (well, except the hardware and software, of course, but I'll tell you how to go about getting that!).
So step right up and get ready to enter a wonderful new world without wires!

What Is Wi-Fi?

The very short version is that Wi-Fi is a way for wireless devices to communicate.
Wi-Fi, short for wireless fidelity, is the Wi-Fi Alliance's name for a wireless standard, or protocol, used for wireless communication. I'll tell you a bit more about this wireless standard and its variations, known collectively as IEEE 802.11 (IEEE stands for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which defines the standard.)

THE WI-FI ALLIANCE

The Wi-Fi Alliance is a not-for-profit organization that certifies the interoperability of wireless devices built around the 802.11 standard. The goals of the Wi-Fi Alliance are to promote interoperability of devices based on 802.11, and, presumably, to promote and enhance the standard.
For better or worse, this is no neutral organization. The members of the Wi-Fi Alliance are manufacturers that build 802.11 devices. As of this writing, there are 205 companies that belong to the Wi-Fi Alliance and more than 900 products that have been certified as Wi-Fi interoperable.
The promise that the Wi-Fi Alliance makes is that if you buy an 802.11 device with the Wi-Fi seal of certification, the device will work seamlessly with any other Wi-Fi certified device.
You can find more information about the Wi-Fi Alliance at the Alliance's Web site, www.wi-fi.org.

Standards and protocols are mostly of interest to engineers.

WHAT IS A STANDARD?

The words standard and protocol are essentially synonymous (protocol is a slightly more technical term). When used in its engineering context, a standard means the technical form of something such as a message or a communication. In other words, a standard might specify how the communication is made.
If you know the standard, you know how to decode the message. In order to work with a standard (called complying with a standard), a device needs to know both how to encode into the standard and decode from the standard.
A standard for working with communications, such as the Wi-Fi standard, will generally involve specifications both at the hardware and the software level (in geek-speak, these levels are called layers).
You can think of the standard as a kind of secret handshake that gets you into a club. If you (or your wireless device) know how the secret handshake works, you can find out what the other people in the club (the other wireless devices) are actually saying.

But Wi-Fi has garnered a huge amount of attention from people who would normally be unconcerned about engineering details: in other words, normal human beings like you and me. Students, professionals, homemakers, English Lit majors, and office workers are all talking about Wi-Fi.
The really big question is: Why is Wi-Fi getting all this attention? I'll get to that soon. I'll also show you how Wi-Fi can change your life (for real!). But first I'd like to tell you a little bit more about what Wi-Fi is.
For now, you need to know that Wi-Fi devices are certified interoperable and run on some flavor of 802.11, a medium-range wireless networking standard. 802.11 runs at speeds roughly comparable to those of wired networks.

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