Ah, good ‘ole WiFi. From helping us to keep our phone bill low (except March, goddammit) to allowing our laptops/tablets/etc. to connect to the internet, WiFi has been a ubiquitous companion that we’ve all come to know and love.
WiFi is also useful for some IoT applications (wait, what is IoT?), such as building and home automation or in-house energy management. For many other IoT applications, WiFi is absolutely useless.
Given the importance of WiFi to our everyday lives and to certain IoT applications, here are 8 interesting things about WiFi that you didn’t know!
1) WiFi Started in Hawaii
Or at least, the early precursor to WiFi did. ALOHAnet was a pioneering computer networking system, developed at the University of Hawaii, that provided the first public demonstration of a wireless packet data network.
That was in 1971. It wasn’t until 20 years later that NCR Corporation and AT&T Corporation invented WaveLAN, considered the true precursor to WiFi. Then, in 1997, the first version of the IEEE 802.11 wireless protocol was released.
“But wait”, you say, “what’s the IEEE 802.11 wireless protocol?”
2) WiFi = IEEE 802.11
When any two machines communicate to each other, they need certain standards and protocols defined to enable them to communicate. IEEE 802.11 refers to the set of standards that define communication for wireless local area networks (with IEEE standing for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
No comments:
Post a Comment