Chapter 1: Wi-Fi-What, Why, Where, Who, and How?

Overview

Wi-Fi happened to me this way: In 1999, I finally got broadband. I loved it instantly. Prior to 1999, my wife Carol and I shared a dialup account, but it was gruesomely slow, and I did most of my Internet work at work, where we had a dual T1 connection. (Fast!) Having something almost that fast at home was intoxicating-and once Carol had spent five minutes in my chair looking something up on the Web, she wanted it too.

What Carol didn't want was for me to punch holes in the walls to pull Ethernet cable down from my office to hers. Our house was old, and quirky, and muchpatched. We completely re-piped it in 1994 and had uncovered so many construction weirdnesses in the process that we were loath to poke at anything for fear of uncovering even more.

I had seen wireless networking in action some years prior to that at a Comdex computer technology convention in Las Vegas. A pioneering system called WaveLAN looked pretty cool but I didn't need it then. When I looked again in 1999, I found that WaveLAN had begat 802.11, and 802.11 had begat 802.11b. The price was frightening but I ponied up for a Cisco Aironet wireless networking system. I plugged a little box with antennas into my router, and downstairs, I plugged a PCI card into the guts of Carol's Compaq. After a few hours figuring out Cisco's documentation, I realized I had an Ethernet connection between my little upstairs network and her downstairs computer, all seamlessly welded to my new broadband Internet connection. Carol and I were surfing the Web simultaneously, on the same connection, at near-T1 speeds.

Ladies and gentlemen, dial-ups had left the building!