Broadband Access: Wireline and Wireless - Alternatives for Internet Services

15WiFi: IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN

15.1 Introduction

We begin our discussion of broadband wireless access technologies with WiFi. WiFi has been the most widely adopted wireless access in the world, both in terms of devices and infrastructure. WiFi chipsets have been part of the standard network interfaces in laptops and smartphones for many years now. Even before all laptops and smartphones were WiFi enabled by default, there was a plethora of WiFi cards that were common in the marketplace, and WiFi networks had begun to become widespread both in offices and homes.

WiFi is the commonly used term for technology that is standardized by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) under their 802 umbrella of standards for Local Area Networks (LANs). Strictly speaking, “WiFi” or “WiFi certified” is the trademark name given to products that are certified to be interoperable by the Wi-Fi Alliance, which is a trade association that promotes WiFi and performs the certifications. The IEEE 802 standards development organization, which focuses on local and metropolitan area networks, has several working groups under it to develop standards for specific access environments. The 802.11 WG was charged with the responsibility to create a standard for wireless LAN (WLAN) in 1992, and the first 802.11 standard was adopted in 1997.

In 1985, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) deregulated the spectrum band from 2.4–2.5 GHz and made it available for use by the industrial, ...