What I m Up To

What I'm Up To

I suppose they had to call it something, so they called it 'Wi-Fi.' (I'll explain who called it that and why a little later.) The industry technical term for Wi-Fi wireless networking is '802.11b,' which means that it was the second 'change request' for the broader 802.11 wireless networking standard published by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers. This is confusing, as there are a whole raft of 802.11 technical standards out there, and you tell them apart only by their final, lower-case letter. (I summarize them all at the end of this book, if you're really interested.)

The word 'wireless' is confusing too, since these days 'wireless' is really technoslang for 'cell phones,' and wireless networking has nothing to do with cell phones. Furthermore, there are several different kinds of 'wireless networking,' some obscure, some extinct, and none compatible with any of the others. Confusion, as usual, is rampant. Computer networking is not an easy business, and it has a great many moving parts. The rate of change in the networking world is breathtaking, and in the wireless networking world, well, not only can't you step in the same river twice, you have to run as hard as you can just to find the river.

What I want to do in this book, and especially in this first chapter, is allow you to get your bearings about the whole Wi-Fi concept, and learn enough about it so that you can teach yourself anything else that you might later need to know. This is not a 'dummies' book; I have more respect for you as a reader than that. I will start at the beginning, but eventually the material will get fairly technical. There's no avoiding it, and it's made worse because I don't have the space to show you screen shots and provide completely unambiguous step-by-steps for every Wi-Fi device on every computing platform there is.

Neither can anyone else.

All of this is to say that you'll have to lay out some effort and study this stuff, and try things, and take notes. Do your damnedest to understand how it works. When networking fails, it tends to fail quietly -that is, it doesn't necessarily put up error messages or do anything but sit there and ignore you. If you can't step back, think it through, gather information about what's going on, and then change something usefully, you will be lost.

With that for preface, let's take on the question of what Wi-Fi is in the simplest and briefest way possible.