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Wireless Networking Explained Wireless networking is just what it sounds like -- a way ofcreating networks without any wires! Wireless networks utilizeradio waves and/or microwaves to maintain commmunicationchannels between computers and other network devices. If thissounds exciting to you, then read on. With a wireless network, you can create radio connectionsbetween computers that let them communicate and connect to theInternet without you having to go to all the trouble ofconnecting them with wires. The computers don't even need tohave a clear path for the signal, as the wireless signal can gothrough walls and between floors easily. Where Did It Come From? The story of is a rather strange one. It isbasically an application of a technology called frequencyhopping which was, believe it or not, invented by the actressHedy Lamarr and a musician named George Antheil, back in the1940s. Seriously, do a web search -- I promise I'm not pullingyour leg here. They received a patent for their invention, which was intendedto help in the war effort. Hedy was Jewish, but had been made tohide it and socialise with Hitler as a young woman -- she had todrug her husband and run away to London to escape her nativeAustria. The importance of what they'd done, however, wasn'trecognised until many years later. The U.S. military adopted the technique in the '60s, using itduring the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hedy never saw any money fromit as the patent had expired (don't worry, she was a filmstar!), but she was given a Pioneer Award by the ElectronicFrontier Foundation in 1997, three years before her death. Wireless at Home When most people talk about wireless networks, they are talkingabout wireless LANs (local area networks). A local area networkdoesn't mean that it covers your whole neighbourhood -- the'local area' in question can be only one building, such as yourhouse. So if you want in your home, you wanta wireless LAN. Once people have wireless in their home, they always seem to actas if there's been an absolute miracle. After years of drillingholes in the walls and running wires all over the place,suddenly seeing them gone is really amazing. The Myths Wireless
networking is expensive. Well, usedto be expensive when it was new, but now the prices have comeway down thanks to competition and mass production. There arehundreds of manufacturers of wireless equipment, with somethingfor every budget. Your costs will depend on how many computersyou want to connect and how far apart they are, but a typicalfamily should still be able to do it for less than $100 overall.If you're willing to leave one of the computers on wheneveryou're using the other one, you could do it for as little as$20! Best of all, once you've spend the money, there's nothingmore to pay after that. Wireless networking is hard. Again, this myth is a holdover fromthe early days of wireless. It used to be very difficult, withyou needing to fiddle endlessly with the configuration on eachcomputer just to get the simplest things to work. Now, though,Windows supports wireless out of the box, and setting it up iseasier than ever. You can usually plug in what you've bought,put the CD in the computer and then sit back and watch it allwork perfectly! Wireless networking is insecure. You might think it's dangerousto have all your personal data floating around in the air foranyone to read. Well, if you want, it's dead easy to enableencryption for your wireless signals. It's already difficult foroutsiders to intercept wireless signals at all, and theycertainly won't be able to decode them as well. Not Just at Home It was home users that were quickest to adopt wirelesstechnology, willing to pay any amount to finally be free ofneeding to run wires all over their house. Since then, though,the technology has started to spread to offices, universities,and all sorts of other places. Chains of coffee shops and cafes have found that their customerswill stay for hours if they offer wireless Internet access, andit's also becoming more common in hotels and airports. Thismeans that once you set up a laptop for wireless, it becomes farmore portable than it ever was before. About the author: Original Source: Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Suppliers of the DeadEasyEbook Maker and Publishing Wizard.
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