The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

Summary

The wireless Internet has arrived – and now the sky's the limit.We stand at the brink of a transformation. It is a moment that echoes the birth of the Internet in the mid-'70s, when the radical pioneers of computer networking - machines talking to each other! - hijacked the telephone system with their first digital hellos. Or that jaw-dropper a decade later when the FCC official whose job it was to track the growth of communications networks suddenly realized that his neat tabulation of local and long-distance had been made moot by the unforeseen rise of local-area networks: an unregulated, unmonitored, uncontrollable phenomenon of the upstart PC industry that would soon shake the telecom world. Or the arrival of the Web browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.This time it is not wires but the air between them that is being transformed. Over the past three years, a wireless technology has arrived with the power to totally change the game. It's a way to give the Internet wing without licenses, permission, or even fees. In a world where we've been conditioned to wait for cell phone carriers to bring us the future, this anarchy of the airwaves is as liberating as the first PCs - a street-level uprising with the power to change everything.The technology is Wi-Fi, and it's the first blast in a revolution, called open spectrum, that will drive the Internet to the next stage in its colonization of the globe. Like the Net itself, Wi-Fi was confined to technical circles for years before exploding into the mainstream, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the past two years, it's become one of the fastest-growing electronics technologies in history.What makes the new standard so alluring? Wi-Fi is cheap, powerful, and, most important, it works. 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...