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The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

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Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#91

Post by bonoboTP »

xp84 wrote: post #85
bonoboTP wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means Internet where your monthly data cap is not consumed.

Haha, yeah right. American ISPs got jealous of Australian ones I guess, because most have caps now. With my gigabit connection I have a 1.25TB cap, so I can technically burn the whole month allowance in 2.77 hours. Yay “broadband”!

Ok, in my world that's not a thing. Mobile data is for most people at most a few or few 10s of gigabytes, so they need to pay attention not to watch many HD videos and download big stuff. On wifi it doesn't matter. The biggest reason for people to switch to wifi in a Cafe etc is the data cap.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#92

Post by chihuahua »

20after4 wrote: post #69
chihuahua wrote: post #30

The tone of the article sounds so breathlessly over-excited that it's bordering on self-parody. The cell phone companies will regret their purchase of 3G spectrum! Those fools, they did not realize their 3G cell towers would soon be rendered obsolete, nay, ridiculous, by my mighty wireless router! It's not consumers buying consumer electronics, no, it's "an authentic grassroots phenomenon."

It seems to me that, for the most part, it was warranted enthusiasm. Wi-Fi has lived up to most of the wildest predictions and probably achieved even greater adoption than anyone could have imagined back in the early days.

That's certainly true; Wi-Fi is a useful and almost indispensable product. I just don't think it's a revolution in which the virtuous consumers wrest control from the evil overloads of Big Spectrum.

I was using computers before Wi-Fi and eventually bought a Wi-Fi router for use at home, so it's not that I've never experienced world without Wi-Fi.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#93

Post by 1718627440 »

oskarkk wrote: post #19
cortesoft wrote: post #12

I still find it strange how people use the word “WiFi” to mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet. They have never plugged in an Ethernet cable in their life. I still get frustrated by WiFi, though, and never use it for my computers unless I had no choice. So many devices these days, the performance is still subpar. Packet loss on the best connections cause so many performance degradations…

> 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 used to hate the term mobile data, before I got to know, that this is the official term, because no you can't take the internet with you.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#94

Post by ghaff »

bonoboTP wrote: post #90
ghaff wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just greater awareness of possible bad outcomes if you just leave your WiFi open.

> Used to be that every cafe and business just had an open wifi network. Now if they provide it at all it’s password protected I reacted to this. Not personal open wifi. In cafes the password is often on the wall, in the menu or otherwise easily obtained.

It's a business and assuming they allow WiFi access on-premises for customers, it's just a business decision that issues associated with having open WiFi are minor relative to customers who won't frequent your establishment--or a hypothetical for a future date that they'll deal with when the time comes.

Probably increasingly irrelevant with increased use of just mobile phones and 5G anyway.

Re: The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

#95

Post by mastax »

davisr wrote: post #46
mastax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2.4GHz was used for microwave ovens and thus the spectrum was reserved for their interference. Or rather, the spectrum was made free for low power uses because Serious Business couldn’t be done on those frequencies due to the microwave ovens.

While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business." I'm not a radio engineer, but it doesn't take that many brain cells…

> While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure, the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."

Yes, but it started out as a little experiment using the scraps of free spectrum available while wireless carriers were paying billions for spectrum licenses. As WiFi has gotten more and more critical, the FCC and industry have worked to overcome many different technical and regulatory challenges to make more and more spectrum available to WiFi notably the 5GHz, 6GHz, 45GHz, and 60GHz bands. The FCC has a financial incentive to not make more unlicensed spectrum available (when they could charge license fees for it instead) and under your theory they'd have national security incentives to keep everything on 2.4GHz as well. Yet they keep making more and more spectrum available unlicensed to WiFi anyway because it's just that important now.

> Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice for personal wireless communication technology.

That is just not true. 2.4GHz works great for WiFi, that's why it's still being used. It penetrates walls pretty well while still being able to handle a decent data rate. Furthermore, all radio frequencies are absorbed by the body, and 2.4 GHz does not have any special higher absorption rate from what I can see. The actual resonance is at about 80MHz: http://niremf.ifac.cnr.it/docs/HANDBOOK/chp3-3-1.htm#336

I don't find it hard to believe that the government has an interest in using radios for through wall imaging/surveillance purposes but the idea that that had some influence on the decision to use 2.4GHz radio for wifi in 2025 doesn't fit the evidence. Additionally, they'd need to have receivers spread around to be able to capture this surveillance data so they could also spread transmitters around at whatever frequency suits their fancy. They don't need to use WiFi for that.

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