Wireless Internet

The last decade of the 20th century was exemplified by a lot of different historical events such as the re-emergence of independent Eastern European states after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Second Gulf War, and the rise of Microsoft to become one of the most powerful computer corporations in the world. However, no other thing had as much of a lasting impact as the emergency and evolution of the global internet. The internet connection, having its humble beginnings as a fixed data link between universities, laboratories and government institutions has developed into a global communications network connecting millions of computers, transferring immeasurable amounts of data and ultimately affecting the lives of every person on the planet. Today, the access to this network is no longer limited to hardwired connections or bottle-necked by the performance of dial-up servers, but in fact it can be accessed wirelessly, from virtually any place on the planet.

The idea of wireless communication has been in use for much longer than the internet. Older people can still remember the popularity of basic, but rather inefficient, radio-wave based toy walkies-talkies. Such devices had a highly limited range, were susceptible to most interference, and provided a half-duplex communication, allowing for only one transmitter at any given time. However, in the late 1970s, the tests, using infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, were already being conducted by most first and second-world governments. Despite their successes, it certainly took a while for this technology to be available to the general public. Furthermore, the world first had to switch from the old-fashioned and intermittent dial-up connection to the hardwired broadband one, now offered from many phone and cable companies, offering stable and continual internet connection at much faster rates.

Thus, it was not until the dawn of the new millennium that the public had finally gotten a real glimpse of the wireless broadband internet. However, once the revolution began it has been impossible to stop, and Wi-Fi, as this type of connection has now been commonly called, has began to be implemented in all sorts of personal devices ranging from computers to music players. Today, any person who owns a notebook computer, can take a short stroll to a variety of places that offer such wireless broadband service for no charge. The only thing that is needed by the consumer is a wireless Ethernet card, which is often directly connected to the motherboard, but can still be supplied externally through the usb if such component is not internally present. Such devices usually cost less than $30 dollars, but can still provide connections at fairly large distances with their transfer rates still exceeding the ones provided by the old-fashioned dial-up systems.