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The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

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Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#51

Post by j45 »

danbolt wrote: post #27

When my parents had a house built in the early 2000s, my father was adamant that Ethernet should be wired to every room. It seemed like a good way to future-proof the building for the 21st century at the time. The year we moved in, tweenage me asked about connecting my Nintendo DS to the internet in order to play Animal Crossing online. I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going…

Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such as set top box devices, etc.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#52

Post by j45 »

danbolt wrote: post #27

When my parents had a house built in the early 2000s, my father was adamant that Ethernet should be wired to every room. It seemed like a good way to future-proof the building for the 21st century at the time. The year we moved in, tweenage me asked about connecting my Nintendo DS to the internet in order to play Animal Crossing online. I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going…

Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such as set top box devices, etc.

The issue wasn't whether wifi was going to become so common, it was the guaranteed improvement in reliability and speed of wifi.

Anyone could use ethernet, and still can.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#53

Post by lloeki »

qingcharles wrote: post #4

It really was revolutionary. Surprisingly the biggest target market for WiFi ended up being phones, which already have a wireless connection to the Internet. 2003 WiFi was routinely awful, though. Generally unstable, poor compatibility and lousy range. A lot better now, but still could be easier for non-techs.

Interestingly, I see an increasing number of young-ish people that simply skip "landline" ISPs (hence WiFi) entirely and only use their phone.

Mostly because around here you can have 100GB over 5G for less than 10€ + they mostly don't use computers (a.k.a laptops) except for a) school (where they have free WiFi+Internet) and b) binge-watching the occasional Netflix (and then they use connection sharing)

Their first move upon setting up a new phone is to disable Bluetooth+WiFi to, uh, "save battery" (their cargo-cult answer, every single time)

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#54

Post by rossant »

sekh60 wrote: post #40
oskarkk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still find it strange how people use the word “WiFi” to mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet. I don't think that's the case, people don't call mobile internet "WiFi". In their minds "WiFi" probably means "home internet", so it's more like they call LAN "WiFi", because they have never used cable connection.

I have a friend who, no matter how many times I have explained it, calls her Internet connection WiFi. I was really confused at first when she said she pays for Wi-Fi. She's 27.

My mother too. She can't understand how she can access the internet anywhere in nature if there's no wifi.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#55

Post by moffkalast »

nytesky wrote: post #22
supertrope wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please make sure to throw away your Kleenex before stepping onto the Escalator.

I don’t think people realize tha Wi-Fi is a brand name for 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'." WiFi, Wifi, or wifi, are not approved by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Despite common belief the name Wi-Fi is not short-form for 'Wireless Fidelity'.

Would an adapter in promiscuous mode technically be Wireless Infidelity?

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#56

Post by encom »

sekh60 wrote: post #40
oskarkk wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still find it strange how people use the word “WiFi” to mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet. I don't think that's the case, people don't call mobile internet "WiFi". In their minds "WiFi" probably means "home internet", so it's more like they call LAN "WiFi", because they have never used cable connection.

I have a friend who, no matter how many times I have explained it, calls her Internet connection WiFi. I was really confused at first when she said she pays for Wi-Fi. She's 27.

And they used to say kids were good with computers. I think if you graph computer illiteracy vs. year of birth, people who were born around the 80's are in the bottom of a bathtub curve.

The boomers are hopeless with tech, because they grew up without it. But gen-z is also hopeless, because they grew up with opaque appliances like Iphones. You use it how Apple allows you to. The inner workings of it are hidden behind endless abstractions and shiny (liquid!) UI. Every error message is something like "Oopsie woopsie" with a sad face emoji. When it breaks you toss it in the garbage.

This reads like an "uphill both ways" story, but we used to build our own computers (still do, but I used to too), because that was how you aquired one unless you bought a Dell like a lamer. When your software messed up it segfaulted or coredumped, and you had to figure it out. When your hardware broke, you took it apart. People today use Discord because picking a client and specifying a server and port combo to connect to is too hard. And so on and so forth, you get the point...

And the point is these damn kids are on my lawn, making TikTok videos.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#57

Post by bjornsing »

sedatk wrote: post #15

When I moved to the temporary housing that Microsoft provided me in Redmond in 2004, the first thing I did was to buy a laptop. The most memorable access point around me was an open connection with the name "Bring food and beer to B308". I used that person's Internet for a while, and wanted to bring beer to them. Unfortunately, when I surveyed the area, I could find no "Bxxx" blocks in Timberlawn Apartments, only A's…

I ran a small ISP around the same time that used this behavioral pattern to bring down the customer acquisition cost to near zero. Essentially we sold ADSL connections with Wi-Fi and a second SSID where anybody could connect and sign up for internet access. If too may signed up we sent out personal offers for ADSL service to some of them and wired up their homes too. Fun project, but stressful and not very profitable.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#58

Post by mantas »

encom wrote: post #56
sekh60 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a friend who, no matter how many times I have explained it, calls her Internet connection WiFi. I was really confused at first when she said she pays for Wi-Fi. She's 27.

And they used to say kids were good with computers. I think if you graph computer illiteracy vs. year of birth, people who were born around the 80's are in the bottom of a bathtub curve. The boomers are hopeless with tech, because they grew up without it. But gen-z is also hopeless, because they grew up with opaque appliances like Iphones. You use it how Apple allows you to. The inner workings of it are hidden behind…

I had similar revelation watching friend’s son asking him stuff about how to use cell phone. When I was young, it was always the other way around. And it still is, I keep helping my parents. But now I wonder if I’ll end up the IT guy in both generational directions.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#59

Post by mjg59 »

In 2000 my neighbour built a small network using two Orinoco Gold cards - an ad-hoc[1] network between his laptop (A Sony with a Neomagic chipset, I don't remember the precise model but it was beautiful) and the desktop in his room, and this was

(a) utterly magical (b) his father was the son of someone very high up in one of the Scottish banks and so this was affordable for him and clearly outside the range of normal people

In 2001 I bought a set of Prism 2 based cards that let me run HostAP (https://hostap.epitest.fi/) and was able to build my own network that didn't rely on ad-hoc mode and so everything was better but the speed at which all of this changed was incredible - we went from infrastructure being out of the reach of normal humans to it being a small reach, and by 2005 we were in the territory of all laptops having it by default. It was an incredible phase shift.

[1] ad hoc was a way for wifi cards to talk to each other without there being an access point, and there was a period where operating systems would show ac-hoc devices as if they were access points, and Windows would remember the last ad-hoc network you'd joined and would advertise that if nothing else was available, and this led to "Free Internet Access" being something that would show up because it was an ad-hoc network someone else advertised and obviously you'd join that and then if you had no internet your laptop would broadcast it and someone else would join it and look the internet was actually genuinely worse in the past please stop assuming everything was better

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#60

Post by NoiseBert69 »

We tested Wifi-7 in our lab due to planned migrations. It's a huge quality mess right now.

Either MLO doesn't work correctly or the drivers of the Modems (we tested Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, etc.) hit the shitter.

For my private stuff I stick to Wifi-6 and wait until Wifi-8 arrives. Finally having "friendly coordinated handovers" between APs is one of the biggest wins for me.

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