What are home wireless networks?

Wireless home networking is exactly what it sounds like: a way to create wireless networks within your home! If this sounds exciting to you, read on.

With a wireless home network, you can create radio connections between computers that allow them to communicate and connect to the Internet without having to go through the hassle of connecting them with cables. Computers don’t even need to have a clear signal path, as the wireless signal can easily pass through walls and between floors.

Where he came from?

The history of wireless networks is quite strange. It’s basically an application of a technology called frequency hopping which, believe it or not, was invented by actress Hedy Lamarr and a musician named George Antheil back in the 1940s. Seriously, do a web search. I promise you I’m not kidding you here.

They received a patent for their invention, which was intended to help the war effort. Hedy was Jewish, but she was forced to hide it and socialize with Hitler when she was young: she had to drug her husband and flee to London to escape her native Austria. However, the importance of what they had done was not recognized until many years later.

The US military adopted the technique in the 1960s, using it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hedy never saw any money from him because the patent had expired (don’t worry, she was a movie star!), but the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave him a Pioneer Award in 1997, three years before her death.

Wireless Network at Home.

When most people talk about wireless networks, they are referring to wireless LANs (Local Area Networks). A local area network does not mean that it covers your entire neighborhood; the ‘local area’ in question may just be a building, such as your house. So if you want a wireless network in your home, you want a home wireless LAN.

Once people have wireless in their home, they always seem to act like an absolute miracle has happened. After years of drilling holes in walls and running wires all over the place, to see them all of a sudden gone is truly amazing.

Home wireless network myths.

Home wireless networks are expensive. Well, home wireless networks used to be expensive when they were new, but now prices have come down a lot thanks to competition and mass production. There are hundreds of manufacturers of wireless equipment, with something for every budget. Your costs will depend on the number of computers you want to connect and the distance between them, but a typical family should still be able to do it for less than $100 overall. If you’re willing to leave one computer on every time you use the other, you could do it for as little as $20! Best of all, once you’ve spent the money, there’s nothing more to pay after that.

Wireless networks in your home are tough. Again, this myth is a holdover from the early days of wireless technology. It used to be very difficult, with the need to endlessly fiddle with settings on each computer just to get the simplest things to work. Now, however, Windows supports wireless right out of the box and setting it up is easier than ever. Usually, you can plug in what you’ve bought, put the CD in the computer, and then sit back and watch everything work perfectly.

A home wireless network is insecure. You may think it’s dangerous to have all your personal data floating around in the air for anyone to read. Well, if you want, it’s very easy to enable encryption for your wireless signals. It’s already hard for outsiders to intercept wireless signals, and they certainly won’t be able to decode them either.

Not only at home.

Home users were the quickest adopters of wireless technology, willing to pay any amount to finally free themselves from the need to run cables throughout the house. Since then, however, the technology has begun to spread to offices, universities, and all sorts of other places.

Coffee and coffee shop chains have found that their customers stay for hours if they offer wireless internet access, and it’s also becoming more common in hotels and airports. This means that once you set up a laptop for wireless, it becomes much more portable than ever.