What is Wi-Fi and How Does it Works

Wi-Fi stands for Wireless Fidelity. It is a wireless network connecting technology that is widely used. Connecting internet through Wi-Fi has become one of the common ways all around the world. To connect your device for the Wi-Fi connection, one must required a wireless adapter on their device. Wi-Fi provides an alternative to broadband services. It works on radio waves to allow receiving and sending signals from the adapter and to the server station.


The areas in which Wi-fi connection can be enable are called Hotspots. These areas includes at home, at work, colleges, schools, airports, hotels, restaurants, malls etc. These days it is always possible to connect the internet through Wi-Fi in almost every public places. These days it is always possible to connect to Wi-Fi connection through any device including operating systems, game devices or even advanced printers.


But how does it works? Well, it is very simple to understand the concept. Like mobile phones, a Wi-Fi network makes use of radio waves to transmit information across a network. The computer or any device should include a wireless adapter that will translate data sent into a radio signal. This same signal will be transmitted, via an antenna, to a decoder known as the router. Once decoded, the data will be sent to the Internet through a wired Ethernet connection. As the wireless network will work as a two-way traffic, the data received from the Internet will also pass through the router to be coded into a radio signal that will be receipted by the computer's wireless adapter.

The frequency of  radio waves plays an important role to receive or transmit the signals. There has been six standards of frequencies so far that defines how much data will receive or transmit from or to the device.

Standard date
802.11 1997	The original specification that defined two transmission rates 1 or 2Mbps working on the 2.4GHz band. It achieves its data rate by using frequency hopping or direct spread spectrum.
802.11a 1999	A relatively recent addition to the standards, it defines a 54Mbps data rate using the 5GHz band by using an advanced transmission technique called Orthogonal Frequency DivisionMultiplexing, OFDM.
802.11b 1999	Currently the most popular and the one most often referred to as WiFi. It operates at 11Mbps but can fall back to lower speeds if conditions are poor. It uses direct spread spectrum transmission in the 2.4GHz band.
802.11g 2003	An upgrade to 802.11a. It uses the same advanced techniques (OFDM) but in the 2.4GHz band to achieve data rates of 54Mbps.
802.16 2001	Also known as WiMax because of its ability to work over much larger distances. It uses the 10-66GHz band to achieve data rates of 70Mbps and greater.
802.11n 2009	Currently the fastest standard capable of using double the bandwidth (40MHz) using multiple streams - still an OFDM coding scheme however.