Podcast Episode Summary
2010 seems to be the year that Wi-Fi became part of the air we breathe: This blog is an unbelievable 9 years, 8 months old. And it's almost unnecessary. Don't cry for me: I have plenty of other writing to occupy my time. But I'd tie the drop in volume of posts here, and the declining traffic to this site over the last three years, to the fact that Wi-Fi generally works well, is built into to nearly everything, and is available in most public places, as well as service being free—or bundled (in the US, Canada, and parts of Europe and Asia) into most smartphone mobile service plans.
When I started writing this blog, 802.11b was the only standard in wide use, the Wi-Fi Alliance had the wonky name of Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA), and an 802.11b base station cost at least $300. That for a whopping 10 Mbps Ethernet port, to push a few Mbps over the air. No laptops came with Wi-Fi built in (Apple was selling an add-on internal card for some laptops and desktops), and you had to mess with driver installation and tweaking.
Here's what I wrote on 9 April 2001:
The proliferation of public space wireless access may transform how people work. It will provide an almost seamless high-speed link between office, home, and road—from home to airport to in flight to airport to hotel to conference center.
Is this good? Will it make folks happier and more efficient? Probably not. But it's a reality that I want to track.
Now, of course, a base station can be under $50 and perform 50 times better, gigabit Ethernet is the rule (with a few exceptions), and you'd be hard pressed to buy smartphones, handhelds, slates, netbooks, and laptops without Wi-Fi soldered right in.
That's a good thing. I've spent an inordinate amount of time in the last 9+ years writing about stuff that didn't work, instead of things that did. I documented products that failed, standards that were released before being fully baked, incompatible approaches that could ruin Wi-Fi, and the near-complete collapse of privately funded municipal wireless networks. Copyright ©2010 Glenn Fleishman. All rights reserved. Please notify us if you find this content anywhere but at wifinetnews.com or wimaxnetnews.com. Reproduction of full articles from RSS feeds is prohibited without permission.
|