8.1 What's Wi-Fi?

Wireless networking in homes and offices has become very popular in just a few years. Such networks are constructed from a number of embedded systems. So, of course, interest in incorporating Wi-Fi into embedded devices has soared. In early 2004, I wrote a piece for NewBits to broadly explain what 802.11 was all about. That was the basis for this article. (CW)

When I was a little kid, back in the early 1960s, we had a "trannie" a transistor radio. This was the cool gadget to have back then the MP3 player of its day. After all, the transistor was the latest technology, having only been invented some 15 years before. We don't seem to have such a long "lab-to-living room" cycle nowadays! My grandmother didn't have a trannie, but in the corner of her kitchen, she had something much more mysterious: a big wooden box with dials and displays that lit up when you switched it on. Nothing else happened when you applied the power because it needed to "warm up" (I guess...