What Is Wifi?

All day I have people tell me that they are computer illiterate. Now most of these people are using it as an icebreaker. What they don't realize is that they are exactly correct in their assessment. These people are not stupid, but they are illiterate. Calm down, it is actually a compliment. If you went to Russia without learning the language you would be illiterate. The same thing is true of computers. It is a whole new language that you have to learn. This is a process just like learning any other language. I cannot teach you the whole language in one blog, but maybe I can clear up one of the more common terms that people have problems with, wifi.

Most people have heard the term wifi, but still have no clue what it really means. People assume that like other confusing terms wifi is short for something. That is not the case. Wifi has never been short for anything. It is simply a term used for the universal standard used to send wireless signals. Wireless standard is IEEE 802.11. This refers to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers standard for sending wireless signal. There are now letters attached at the back of IEEE 802.11. These indicate a larger data sending capacity which translates to a faster connection for you. The most current standard is IEEE 802.11n.

Now that I have given you a bunch of technical jargon that you don't understand or care about let me see if I can put it in English for you. Basically a wireless device takes the signal it receives and turns it into radio waves. It then broadcasts these radio waves so that another wireless device can pick them up. The wireless device that picks the radio waves up translates them back into a language that the computer can understand. So you are basically just sending and receiving radio waves.

You basically need three things in order to make wifi happen in your life. You need an internet connection that makes a signal to translate. You need a wireless router to translate the signal into radio waves, and you need a computer with a wireless device to pick up the radio waves and translate them into computer language. If you are missing one of those then you cannot have wifi. Yes it can be confusing, and no it is not easy the first time you deal with it. However, just like learning a language if you start at the beginning and take it one step at a time you can do this, or you could always just get someone who is ten to do it for you, they are all computer literate.