[HN Gopher] The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)
___________________________________________________________________
The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)
Author : Cieplak
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-10-12 07:35 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| Waraqa wrote:
| I still remember the shock when my father told me he had
| connected his laptop to the internet without a cable. I'd heard
| of wireless networking but didn't know it was a standard feature
| in laptops at the time and all you need is to find a wifi point.
| Waraqa wrote:
| https://archive.is/8tLce
| qingcharles wrote:
| It really was revolutionary. Surprisingly the biggest target
| market for WiFi ended up being phones, which already have a
| wireless connection to the Internet.
|
| 2003 WiFi was routinely awful, though. Generally unstable, poor
| compatibility and lousy range. A lot better now, but still could
| be easier for non-techs.
| carbocation wrote:
| Biggest market agreed. But relative impact on utility of
| laptops seems enormous.
| ghaff wrote:
| Certainly before every electronic device on WiFi became
| ubiquitous.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| Also unsecure. I remember driving around looking for Wi-Fi to
| steal internet from, I routinely found network shares full of
| sensitive documents. And I only looked for open WiFi and wasn't
| even trying to hack anything.
|
| If I actually wanted to hack into networks, encrypted WiFi used
| WEP which could be cracked in minutes on a typical laptop. Most
| communication was unencrypted too, pwning entire WiFi networks
| wasn't even fun considering how easy it was.
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yikes. I forgot you could get free WiFi practically anywhere
| you could get a signal because everyone's WiFi was open or
| easy to hack.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I miss when free wifi was everywhere. When I was traveling
| Italy my phone seemed to almost never have signal despite
| paying for roaming data. And I couldn't find free wifi
| anywhere. The few places that did have it like mcdonalds
| wanted me to authenticate with sms which wasn't working
| since I had no phone signal.
|
| Used to be that every cafe and business just had an open
| wifi network. Now if they provide it at all it's password
| protected
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Part of the general decrease of trust.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or just greater awareness of possible bad outcomes if you
| just leave your WiFi open.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think it is more correct to say open wifi made it easier to
| connect to otherwise already insecure systems. After all,
| anybody in the house with an Ethernet cable could get those
| sensitive documents, right? Open wifi just expected users to
| actually follow the mantra of the time: don't trust the
| infrastructure!
| throw0101d wrote:
| > _Also unsecure._
|
| One of my early IT jobs in the 2000s was at a SME with Wifi:
| after you connected radio-wise, you had to start the VPN
| client, because at the time there really wasn't any
| (effective) encryption of the signal in 802.11 itself.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the early 2000s hotels also still routinely charged for
| WiFi. But someplace like NY, you could usually find an open
| ssid within range. But, yes, in that period many WiFi
| transmissions didn't have a password.
| qingcharles wrote:
| God yeah, every time I stayed at a hotel I prayed that
| there was a business next door with open WiFi so I wouldn't
| have to pay $30/night.
| Marsymars wrote:
| I had 2005 wifi with 56k dial-up, so even at the wifi's worse I
| could sustain my full internet speed.
| mumber_typhoon wrote:
| >the biggest target market for WiFi ended up being phones
|
| If a particular category is considered then yes, phones are the
| biggest chunk. But virtually every device these days comes with
| WiFi. So wifi is now the default method of connecting
| something.
| lloeki wrote:
| Interestingly, I see an increasing number of young-ish people
| that simply skip "landline" ISPs (hence WiFi) entirely and only
| use their phone.
|
| Mostly because around here you can have 100GB over 5G for less
| than 10EUR + they mostly don't use computers (a.k.a laptops)
| except for a) school (where they have free WiFi+Internet) and
| b) binge-watching the occasional Netflix (and then they use
| connection sharing)
|
| Their first move upon setting up a new phone is to disable
| Bluetooth+WiFi to, uh, "save battery" (their cargo-cult answer,
| every single time)
| ksec wrote:
| That is increasingly true and will only get more mainstream
| as times comes by. Why pay for Home WiFi. ( Internet ) when
| you have 5G / Mobile Data. 5GSA will further increase Mobile
| network capacity, and mobile network will be all you need.
| MNOs will specially those without cable / fibre to home
| infrastructure are already promoting 5G home solution as
| replacement.
| lozenge wrote:
| This has also happened for entire countries.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| Remember the Steve Jobs presentation where he put an iBook
| through a hula hoop to prove there are no cables? Classic
| davisr wrote:
| And the FCC just so happened to approve the spectrum of
| frequencies that human bodies absorb, turning each Wi-Fi hotspot
| into surveillance spotlight, and each handheld device into a
| unique beacon. With everything we know about NSA's influence in
| other government agencies (like NIST), I think it's entirely
| reasonable to ask, "why 2.4 GHz?" But I've not seen anyone ask
| that question here. I'd also wonder whether NRO has satellite
| capability to measure Wi-Fi signals (and interference from human
| bodies) from orbit.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Less conspiratorially, Wired themselves have an article about
| that: https://www.wired.com/2010/09/wireless-explainer/
|
| TL;DR because the FCC regulates available frequency bands, and
| 900MHz, 2.4GHz, and 5GHz were the ones that were 1) the right
| combination of high enough to be fast and low enough to be
| energy efficient and easy to generate, and 2) actually
| available for use at the time.
| mastax wrote:
| 2.4GHz was used for microwave ovens and thus the spectrum was
| reserved for their interference. Or rather, the spectrum was
| made free for low power uses because Serious Business couldn't
| be done on those frequencies due to the microwave ovens.
| davisr wrote:
| While that provides a plausible origin story, it doesn't
| stand to reason why the 2.4 GHz carrier frequency has been
| sustained for so long. For toy or prototype purposes, sure,
| the FCC could say "put them next to the microwave ovens." But
| Wi-Fi is, at this point, a critical national security
| utility, or even as you put it yourself, "serious business."
|
| I'm not a radio engineer, but it doesn't take that many brain
| cells to beg the question: for a handheld/laptop device, why
| choose a carrier wave frequency absorbed by the body holding
| it, and by the metallic electronics sitting beside it?
| Logically, that's one of the most energy-inefficient
| frequencies one could choose, and a terrible design choice
| for personal wireless communication technology. I think a
| good engineer would want to conserve power and not be blocked
| by the very body holding it.
|
| However, as the future unfolded, we now have nearly every
| household with a bright radiant point light casting human-
| shaped shadows, trivially reconstructed, to detect not only
| the body's silhouette but it's heartbeat and respiration,
| too.
|
| And with everything we know, with leaks going back decades
| about the abuses of government power, surveilling their own
| citizenry, recording, analyzing, and manipulating the
| population in subtle ways, resulting in the financial
| benefactor of a handful of billionaires and the power
| benefactor of media-savvy pawns, why are these basic
| technological choices not being questioned more?
|
| (mastax, I'm replying to you because you're top reply, but
| felt it important to continue my original point.)
| CursedSilicon wrote:
| Unfortunately in the real world, truth is far less interesting
| than fantasy
| xzjis wrote:
| > Like other open spectrum technologies rising in its wake, Wi-Fi
| is a way to use the handful of frequencies set aside for
| unrestricted consumer use. That's true of the old CB radio, too,
| but unlike the trucker channels Wi-Fi is digital and smart enough
| to avoid congestion. After 100 years of regulations that assumed
| serious wireless technologies were fragile and in need of
| protection by monopolies on exclusive frequencies (making
| spectrum the most valuable commodity of the information age), Wi-
| Fi is fully capable of protecting itself.
|
| It's true that, unlike other wireless transmission technologies,
| Wi-Fi allows any company to make a product that can transmit or
| receive on all frequency bands authorized by a country, whereas
| for mobile networks, for example, each operator acquires
| exclusive rights to a frequency band.
|
| That shows that open standards work well and enable healthy
| competition.
| dkarl wrote:
| Side note, it's interesting how common it is for tech-savvy
| people to wire their homes for ethernet (more common now than
| 10-15 years ago) and how it is still common, or at least not
| rare, for people reliant on wi-fi to suffer from video streaming
| issues. The underlying technology keeps getting better, so maybe
| the improvements will outpace the growth in congestion at some
| point -- fingers crossed that makers of apps and household
| appliances don't eat up all future gains and keep us stuck in the
| same place.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I would love for a single AP to serve 500mbps throughout a
| whole house.
|
| Though I would certainly not have complained about 50-100mbps
| throughout in 2003 -- 1GBps wired networking was not mainstream
| then.
| dmd wrote:
| My tp-link ax6000 does that just fine.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Oh, how I wish. I have 3 Firewalla AP7s to get decent
| coverage through my house. Its lath and plaster walls may
| as well be lead lined. You could put a CT scanner in my
| living room and not notice a thing 2 rooms away.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Lath and plaster walls have a distressing tendency to be
| lined with chicken wire mesh which really damages your
| chances of any radio signal getting through.
|
| Pictures for anyone wondering what it looks like:
|
| https://www.civilengineermag.com/chicken-mesh-for-
| plaster/
|
| Wired wifi mesh or Ethernet all over would be my
| prescription. You basically have Faraday cages in every
| room right now!
| kstrauser wrote:
| I've strung CAT 6e from one end of the house to the other
| to link 2 of them. The 3rd's in a place not amenable to
| cabling without way more effort than I'm up for, but it's
| close enough to one of them that they mesh alright.
| esseph wrote:
| Ethernet/fiber is far better in that scenario. You may
| even have better luck using existing coax and moca
| adapters than wifi in those scenarios.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Is congestion still an issue? Seems to me like after the switch
| from 2.4ghz to 5ghz, congestion stopped being a problem since
| wifi hardly leaves your own home. Amusingly, in my apartment
| sitting on the balcony, shutting the glass door would cause a
| total loss of connection, while leaving it open resulted in a
| very strong connection.
|
| The future is probably just having multiple wifi APs wired up
| and then just running extremely fast but low range wifi.
| esseph wrote:
| > The future is probably just having multiple wifi APs wired
| up and then just running extremely fast but low range wifi.
|
| Well, what if you want wifi in your garden? Maybe you own a
| few acres of property and you want wifi for a wedding? Now
| you actually have to do a minor bit of planning. Supported
| wifi versions, max EIRP, range, modulation rate, throughput,
| XPIC, coverage area, frequency, beamwidth, MU-MIMO, does the
| frequency require prior coordination with any government
| entity, etc.
|
| I'm just giving a different use-case on the other end of the
| spectrum, to be fair. I agree 100% with your analysis
| however, we're going to mmwave frequency ranges with small
| but many APs. Massive Multi User MIMO, etc.
| mvkg wrote:
| 5GHz certainly helps, but congestion/co-channel interference
| can still be an issue in high density environments,
| especially in a multi-user environment like an apartment
| complex where nothing is coordinated. The addition of 6GHz
| will help alleviate this problem too, but a lot of consumer
| gear seems to default to the widest channels possible.
|
| Also, your glass door probably has Low-E glass which has a
| metallic coating.
|
| > The future is probably just having multiple wifi APs wired
| up and then just running extremely fast but low range wifi.
|
| This is somewhat the case, but it is limited. For example, in
| 5GHz there are 21x 20MHz channels available. In a highly
| dense environment, this can support roughly 30x devices per
| channel well and 50x devices per channel with some
| degradation.
|
| Limiting the TX power on an AP can help, but it's not a
| panacea since clients always transmit their control frames at
| their default power (usually ~15dBm). There have been some
| improvements to this in .11ax, but depending on the spatial
| organization of the devices, it can only do so much.
| Marsymars wrote:
| It's not like everything has moved off 2.4ghz - I'm in a SFH
| in a relatively low-density suburb and everything in my house
| that can be wired is, but I still typically see ~50%
| congestion on the 2.4ghz radios.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Yeah I just had a look and I'm seeing a reasonable amount
| of interference on 2.4ghz, very little on 5ghz, and then
| nothing at all on 6ghz.
|
| My guess is people with large houses and only one wifi AP
| are probably using 2.4 when their devices are out of range
| for 5. But other people doing this probably doesn't impact
| you at all since you can just make sure you have good
| coverage for 5ghz and enjoy uncongested wifi.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I still find it strange how people use the word "WiFi" to mean
| internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet.
| They have never plugged in an Ethernet cable in their life.
|
| I still get frustrated by WiFi, though, and never use it for my
| computers unless I had no choice. So many devices these days, the
| performance is still subpar. Packet loss on the best connections
| cause so many performance degradations.
| oskarkk wrote:
| > I still find it strange how people use the word "WiFi" to
| mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the
| internet.
|
| I don't think that's the case, people don't call mobile
| internet "WiFi". In their minds "WiFi" probably means "home
| internet", so it's more like they call LAN "WiFi", because they
| have never used cable connection.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, that's true. I even thought about that when I was
| typing my comment but wasn't sure the best way to articulate
| the difference, but I think you are right with it being about
| home internet vs cellular.
|
| Although I really think it is just used to mean "non-phone
| based internet", rather than just home internet.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It means Internet where your monthly data cap is not
| consumed.
| xp84 wrote:
| Haha, yeah right. American ISPs got jealous of Australian
| ones I guess, because most have caps now. With my gigabit
| connection I have a 1.25TB cap, so I can technically burn
| the whole month allowance in 2.77 hours. Yay "broadband"!
| zenoprax wrote:
| I think if you're not "on Wifi" then you're "on data" (or
| perhaps "on 5G" if it's a social status thing). If one were
| to connect via Starlink then it would still be correct to say
| you were on Wifi I think but if you could hook up ethernet
| directly... I think most of us would say you're now "on
| satellite"?
|
| I didn't even consider that the newest iPhones can connect to
| satellites _directly_.
| sekh60 wrote:
| I have a friend who, no matter how many times I have
| explained it, calls her Internet connection WiFi. I was
| really confused at first when she said she pays for Wi-Fi.
| She's 27.
| k1t wrote:
| She's not alone - here's an example (from today!) of an HN
| user using WiFi to mean cellular/mobile data
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45620379
| rossant wrote:
| My mother too. She can't understand how she can access the
| internet anywhere in nature if there's no wifi.
| encom wrote:
| And they used to say kids were good with computers. I think
| if you graph computer illiteracy vs. year of birth, people
| who were born around the 80's are in the bottom of a
| bathtub curve.
|
| The boomers are hopeless with tech, because they grew up
| without it. But gen-z is also hopeless, because they grew
| up with opaque appliances like Iphones. You use it how
| Apple allows you to. The inner workings of it are hidden
| behind endless abstractions and shiny (liquid!) UI. Every
| error message is something like "Oopsie woopsie" with a sad
| face emoji. When it breaks you toss it in the garbage.
|
| This reads like an "uphill both ways" story, but we used to
| build our own computers (still do, but I used to too),
| because that was how you aquired one unless you bought a
| Dell like a lamer. When your software messed up it
| segfaulted or coredumped, and you had to figure it out.
| When your hardware broke, you took it apart. People today
| use Discord because picking a client and specifying a
| server and port combo to connect to is too hard. And so on
| and so forth, you get the point...
|
| And the point is these damn kids are on my lawn, making
| TikTok videos.
| mantas wrote:
| I had similar revelation watching friend's son asking him
| stuff about how to use cell phone. When I was young, it
| was always the other way around. And it still is, I keep
| helping my parents. But now I wonder if I'll end up the
| IT guy in both generational directions.
| xp84 wrote:
| I think we will, but I'm cringing harder and harder these
| days because my "clients" (friends and children) are
| often bringing me problems that are just unsolvable due
| to all the guardrails put up "for our protection." For
| instance, "my iPhone says it's full"
|
| _looks at storage stats_
|
| 40GB worth of "System Data" and 20GB of Safari "Documents
| and Data" - zero visibility as to what it is let alone
| simple controls to get rid of it in a reasonable way. On
| a real computer, that's the kind of thing an admin has
| ultimate authority over. Now, especially on phones, you
| may as well be a call center tech saying "Well, I guess
| you can erase the entire phone and don't restore a
| backup?" because that's the only guaranteed fix for most
| problems.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| This also applies to many other things, such as cars. But
| perhaps the timeline is shifted.
|
| But if we go earlier a bit, it was common for people to
| know much more about house construction, electric work,
| flooring, making furniture etc. IKEA emulates some of
| this, but it's really a different thing to live around
| things you truly understand, you participated in builting
| your house, you know how and why everything is in it, you
| can fix your car, you can make produce in your garden,
| you eat your chickens' eggs, which you can turn into
| baked chicken, the whole process from hatching to hen to
| plate is managed by you etc.
|
| People are having less and less control and understanding
| of their lives. It's all "coming from somewhere" and
| wrapped in abstractions and euphemisms. You no longer buy
| things, just rent, etc. It really changes the mentality
| to a more child-like thinking, at the mercy of some
| opaque system. With AI we will get the final blow. No
| skills, no intellectual muscle, just as people don't even
| remember the and driving directions to even places they
| regularly visit, because GPS gives instructions so it's
| just not memorized. It will be the same but for
| everything.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Brawndo: it's got what plant's crave.
| adfm wrote:
| It's got electrolytes.
| encom wrote:
| It's why I became an electrician, and specialised in
| telecoms. I realised in my 20's that I didn't want to
| spend the rest of my life typing on a keyboard, and
| telecoms is the right kind of combination of geekery and
| practical work. Plus I know all the fundamental
| electrician stuff. I highly recommend this career path if
| you feel the same way. My last job was in robotics where
| my combined skillset of being a Linux-focused
| computer+networking geek and having electrical skills
| made me pretty unique. Lately my career has taken a
| bizarre turn where I do AV, networking and electrical
| work, plus... swimming pool maintenance. Life, uh, finds
| a way.
|
| Anyways, apart from knowing how a car works on a
| theoretical level, I have no idea how to fix mine, and
| getting fucked at the dealership is a part of my life I
| have begrudgingly accepted.
|
| Thanks for reading my blog.
| supertrope wrote:
| Please make sure to throw away your Kleenex before stepping
| onto the Escalator.
| nytesky wrote:
| I don't think people realize tha Wi-Fi is a brand name for
| 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'." WiFi, Wifi, or wifi, are not
| approved by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Despite common belief the
| name Wi-Fi is not short-form for 'Wireless Fidelity'.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Would an adapter in promiscuous mode technically be
| Wireless Infidelity?
| xp84 wrote:
| nice
| ezoe wrote:
| In my country, GIGA means "data transfer quota", USB means "USB
| storage"
| GuB-42 wrote:
| > A box the size of a paperback, and costing no more than dinner
| for two, magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the
| size of a football field. A card no larger than a matchbook
| receives it.
|
| An interesting historical document for studying the unit systems
| used in 2003.
| walterbell wrote:
| What might be the 2025 equivalents?
| minhmeoke wrote:
| Router/Access point: Matchbox, eg: TP-Link TL-WR802N (57 x 57
| x18 mm) [6] or GL-Inet GL-MT300N (58 x 58 x 25mm) [7]
|
| WiFi USB Client: Fingernail, eg: Asus USB-AX56 adapter (25.5
| x 16 x 9mm) [8]
|
| WiFi Card Client: Postage stamp, eg: Intel Dual-Band Wireless
| Adapter AC-7260NGW M.2 2230 (22mm x 30mm x 2.4mm) [10]
|
| 802.11n Wireless N range: theoretically 230 ft (70 m) range
| indoors and 820 ft (250m) range outdoors, which is
| approximately 1 FIFA soccer field's (105 x 68 m) width for
| indoor range, and 2 soccer fields end-to-end by 3 side-to-
| side for outdoor range. Newer protocols do not seem to have
| extended the range of individual radios but rather rely on
| repeaters or range extender devices to provide additional
| coverage.
|
| https://www.hummingbirdnetworks.com/articles/what-is-the-
| dis...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#Protocol
|
| https://publications.fifa.com/de/football-stadiums-
| guideline...
|
| Some of these are slightly older devices dating from around
| 2020, but the sizes should generally still be approximately
| the same in 2025.
|
| Router/Access point: Mobile operating systems like WebOS,
| Android, and iOS have had hotspot capabilites built-in since
| around around 2010 (Mobile Hotspot on Palm Pre and Pixi Plus
| in 2010 [1], Wifi Tethering in Android 2.2 Froyo in 2010 [2],
| and Personal Hotspot in iOS 4.3 for iPhone 4 and 3GS in 2011
| [3]). Today you can configure your phone to become a personal
| Wifi router with one button press [4], [5].
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/01/07/ces.palm.pre.plus.pix
| i/i...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20101125023042/http://articles.c.
| ..
|
| https://archive.is/UD1Dm
|
| [2] https://www.wired.com/2010/05/android-22-froyo-features-
| usb-...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140707210122/https://www.wired.
| ..
|
| https://archive.is/kjH1N
|
| [3] https://www.engadget.com/2011-03-09-ios-4-3-spotlight-
| person...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251018061108/https://www.engad.
| ..
|
| https://archive.is/QBRod
|
| [4] https://support.google.com/android/answer/9059108?hl=en
|
| [5] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-your-
| internet-c...
|
| For a discrete router device, TP-Link TL-WR802N (57 x 57 x18
| mm) [6] and GL-Inet GL-MT300N (58 x 58 x 25mm) [7] are
| matchbox-sized travel router devices that fit into the palm
| of your hand, cost less than $30 USD, and consume less than
| 2.75W (they can be run from a basic 5V, 1A USB connection).
|
| [6] https://www.tp-link.com/us/home-networking/wifi-
| router/tl-wr...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250724184720/https://www.tp-
| li...
|
| [7] https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt300n-v2/
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20250822045920/https://www.gl-
| in...
|
| Wifi Client: Wifi capabilities are now built into mobile
| phone, TV, and many camera chipsets, there is no separate
| card required. If you want a separate WiFi adapter, you can
| buy a USB adapter that is about the size of a fingernail or 5
| small coins stacked together (eg: 5 US pennies, or 5 Euro
| 1-cent coins), basically take the metal part of a USB-A male
| connector and extend or extrude it a bit. This Asus USB-AX56
| adapter [8] is 25.5 x 16 x 9mm and supports WiFi 6 (802.11ax)
| with theoretical speeds up to 9.6 Gbps (actual real-world
| speeds appear closer to 800 Mbps). Streams in Wifi 6 can be
| up to 160MHz wide via channel bonding of up to 8 adjacent 20
| MHz channels, but in practice this is only feasible in
| locations with low or no interference. Note that wider
| channels have a reduced effective range and perform poorly at
| a distance or through obstructions.
|
| [8] https://www.asus.com/networking-iot-servers/adapters/all-
| ser...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251018061524/https://www.asus..
| ..
|
| https://www.wi-fi.org/wi-fi-macphy
|
| Discrete Wifi cards can still be found in some laptop
| computers (although many Wifi cards are now soldered down),
| one of the more recent (introduced around 2013 to 2015) and
| smaller sizes is M.2 2230 (22mm x 30mm x 2.4mm) which is also
| the form factor for some M.2 PCI-Express SSDs (solid state
| storage drives, typically flash devices). These are about the
| size of a postage stamp, weigh around 2.3 grams, and cost
| around $20 USD or less.
|
| One example is Intel AX210 [9] which supports Wi-Fi 6E, on 3
| bands: 2.4 / 5 / 6GHz in a 2x2 configuration (2 TX transmit
| and 2 RX receive antennas) at speeds of 2.4 Gbps, and also
| features Bluetooth 5.3.
|
| [9] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/2048
| 36/...
|
| A popular previous-generation device is Intel Dual-Band
| Wireless Adapter AC-7260NGW [10] with good support for
| GNU/Linux, again with a M.2 2230 (22mm x 30mm x 2.4mm) form-
| factor approximately the size of a postage stamp, supporting
| Wifi 5 802.11ac with up to 867 Mbps theoretical bandwidth on
| dual bands in a 2x2 configuration (2 TX transmit and 2 RX
| receive radios), and 433 Mbps per stream. Channels can be up
| to 80MHz wide via channel bonding of 4 adjacent 20 MHz
| channels.
|
| An alternative, earlier form factor was Half Mini-PCI-
| Express, for example Intel Dual-Band Wirelss Adapter
| AC-7260HMW [10] at 26.80 x 30 x 2.4 mm.
|
| [10] https://www.mouser.com/datasheet/2/612/dual-band-
| wireless-ac...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20251018061520/https://www.mouse.
| ..
| sedatk wrote:
| When I moved to the temporary housing that Microsoft provided me
| in Redmond in 2004, the first thing I did was to buy a laptop.
| The most memorable access point around me was an open connection
| with the name "Bring food and beer to B308". I used that person's
| Internet for a while, and wanted to bring beer to them.
| Unfortunately, when I surveyed the area, I could find no "Bxxx"
| blocks in Timberlawn Apartments, only A's. It was probably a
| neighboring complex. I want to use this opportunity thank that
| person.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I ran a small ISP around the same time that used this
| behavioral pattern to bring down the customer acquisition cost
| to near zero. Essentially we sold ADSL connections with Wi-Fi
| and a second SSID where anybody could connect and sign up for
| internet access. If too may signed up we sent out personal
| offers for ADSL service to some of them and wired up their
| homes too. Fun project, but stressful and not very profitable.
| danbolt wrote:
| When my parents had a house built in the early 2000s, my father
| was adamant that Ethernet should be wired to every room. It
| seemed like a good way to future-proof the building for the 21st
| century at the time. The year we moved in, tweenage me asked
| about connecting my Nintendo DS to the internet in order to play
| Animal Crossing online.
|
| I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that
| Wi-Fi was going to become so common.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| Even with wifi, big houses or tough RF environments need mesh
| units to get ubiquitous wifi coverage. And there, ethernet
| wired backhaul is far, far superior to wireless. So maybe your
| dad was prescient in a different way.
|
| The issue with wiring your house for Ethernet is that 2003-era
| Cat5 that a random builder or DIYer grabs from Home Depot isn't
| going to carry nearly as much as the Cat6A cable you would want
| if you need the cable plant to have a chance of keeping up with
| network capacity growth. But that needs quality installation.
| ghaff wrote:
| I had a fairly extensive Ethernet and audio speaker setup in
| the course of a couple of house renovations. Much of that is
| trashed from smoke mitigation after a kitchen fire. Will
| pretty much just use WiFi from here on out.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew
| that Wi-Fi was going to become so common.
|
| Today, if your wiring up a house you put ethernet drops
| everywhere.
|
| POE is a thing, and it's getting more popular.
|
| Cameras, blinds, MM wave... It's almost to the point where one
| should be putting a media box in every closet as a mini wiring
| hookup.
| j45 wrote:
| Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such
| as set top box devices, etc.
| j45 wrote:
| Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such
| as set top box devices, etc.
|
| The issue wasn't whether wifi was going to become so common, it
| was the guaranteed improvement in reliability and speed of
| wifi.
|
| Anyone could use ethernet, and still can.
| xandrius wrote:
| I would still do this in 2025, just with different category of
| ethernet cable, that's it.
| chihuahua wrote:
| The tone of the article sounds so breathlessly over-excited that
| it's bordering on self-parody.
|
| The cell phone companies will regret their purchase of 3G
| spectrum! Those fools, they did not realize their 3G cell towers
| would soon be rendered obsolete, nay, ridiculous, by my mighty
| wireless router!
|
| It's not consumers buying consumer electronics, no, it's "an
| authentic grassroots phenomenon."
| 20after4 wrote:
| It seems to me that, for the most part, it was warranted
| enthusiasm. Wi-Fi has lived up to most of the wildest
| predictions and probably achieved even greater adoption than
| anyone could have imagined back in the early days.
| dualogy wrote:
| > The tone of the article sounds so breathlessly over-excited
| that it's bordering on self-parody.
|
| Welcome to every Wired article ever, certainly from its
| inception well into the mid-2000s at least.
|
| Today it's at best amusing, but those were times just 1-1.5
| generations ago when that was truly, genuinely generally
| enjoyed (by techies & youngsters) as neither Tired nor Expired
| but (Hot)Wired, and as a needed/welcome breath of air in an
| ocean of seemingly-immutable last-century whiffs & echoes =)
| topspin wrote:
| My first use of Wi-Fi was for "broadband" internet in very early
| 2000's. It wasn't that fast, but it was pretty cool. The access
| point was on a mountain top about 7 miles from my condo. My
| antenna was a parabolic aluminum grid in my attic. I think the
| permitted bandwidth was about 400 Kbps. The transceivers were
| Cisco Aironet 802.11b devices.
|
| That was my main Internet uplink for 5 or more years. About half
| way through I moved to another house and mounted the antenna
| outside on the roof for more gain, because the distance increased
| to about 11 miles. Caught some grief from the HOA, but I kept it
| up.
| miladyincontrol wrote:
| A curious artifact of the older days is even to this day a
| surprising number of devices will caution about the dangers of
| connecting to an SSID named linksys, even if its WPA3, modern
| 802.11ax on both AP and client end, etc.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| I remember the jump from 802.11b to g was profound. Speed was no
| longer a luxury. You could browse while torrenting an MP3 file at
| the same time, wirelessly! It was the golden era of the Internet
| :)
| mjg59 wrote:
| In 2000 my neighbour built a small network using two Orinoco Gold
| cards - an ad-hoc[1] network between his laptop (A Sony with a
| Neomagic chipset, I don't remember the precise model but it was
| beautiful) and the desktop in his room, and this was
|
| (a) utterly magical (b) his father was the son of someone very
| high up in one of the Scottish banks and so this was affordable
| for him and clearly outside the range of normal people
|
| In 2001 I bought a set of Prism 2 based cards that let me run
| HostAP (https://hostap.epitest.fi/) and was able to build my own
| network that didn't rely on ad-hoc mode and so everything was
| better but the speed at which all of this changed was incredible
| - we went from infrastructure being out of the reach of normal
| humans to it being a small reach, and by 2005 we were in the
| territory of all laptops having it by default. It was an
| incredible phase shift.
|
| [1] ad hoc was a way for wifi cards to talk to each other without
| there being an access point, and there was a period where
| operating systems would show ac-hoc devices as if they were
| access points, and Windows would remember the last ad-hoc network
| you'd joined and would advertise that if nothing else was
| available, and this led to "Free Internet Access" being something
| that would show up because it was an ad-hoc network someone else
| advertised and obviously you'd join that and then if you had no
| internet your laptop would broadcast it and someone else would
| join it and look the internet was actually genuinely worse in the
| past please stop assuming everything was better
| NoiseBert69 wrote:
| We tested Wifi-7 in our lab due to planned migrations. It's a
| huge quality mess right now.
|
| Either MLO doesn't work correctly or the drivers of the Modems
| (we tested Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, etc.) hit the shitter.
|
| For my private stuff I stick to Wifi-6 and wait until Wifi-8
| arrives. Finally having "friendly coordinated handovers" between
| APs is one of the biggest wins for me.
| ksec wrote:
| In case this still isn't common knowledge. You should always
| use WiFi 7 hardware as the latest WiFi 6E solution. I.e Latest
| Generation of WiFi is the best version of last generation.
|
| Just like when WiFi 6 came out, OFDMA didn't work well or
| wasn't even turned on by default. The same thing happened with
| WiFi 5 MU-MIMO, and WiFi 7 MLO. Expect the MLO to only work
| with WiFi 8.
|
| And for all the latency reduction and reliability upgrade with
| WiFi 8? The expect them to work well in WiFi 9.
| izacus wrote:
| Wifi 7 without MLO works just fine and quickly though.
| throw0101d wrote:
| _The Serial Port_ put up a video saying that Apple really helped
| push Wifi into the mainstream with the AirPort:
|
| * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhBxWHrG7K8
| teleforce wrote:
| What they didn't mention in the article and most Wi-Fi historical
| narrative is the critical contribution from OFDM modulation
| waveform technology, the idea originated and patented by the
| radio astronomy research of CSIRO Australia [1],[2].
|
| In the early days of Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 group was still testing
| spread spectrum and OFDM with 802.11b and 802.11a, respectively.
| But then it's become apparent that the best bandwidth come from
| the proper orthogonality of wireless modulation aka OFDM [1].
|
| At the time of the OP article back in 2003 the incumbent cellular
| mobile modulation of 3G is still spread spectrum based CMDA
| system but by 4G it's OFDM all-in and the rest is history. CSIRO
| become much richer due to the patent, and radio astronomy based
| technology generated some hard cash for the research institute
| that mainly pursuing science.
|
| [1] Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_...
|
| [2] How the Aussie government "invented WiFi" and sued its way to
| $430 million [PDF]:
|
| https://www.vbllaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/How-The-Au...
| andrepd wrote:
| Just one more example of how investment in fundamental science,
| _without_ explicit reference to marketability or industry
| applications, often produce revolutionary technology which
| _does_ have economic applications.
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