[Make-wifi-fast] 20 year anniversary of wifi

[Bob McMahon]

For what it's worth, Teresa Meng (founder of Atheros) said in 2004

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=984469

"TM: There are three basic ingredients in the technology. The first is
definitely signal processing. In the past two decades a lot of research and
industry achievements have made it possible for us to understand how to
transmit signals through a wireless medium, based on sophisticated signal
processing algorithms.

Second, in the late ’90s, it became possible to implement gigahertz RF
circuits using digital CMOS technology—the predominant technology that
people have been using for implementing microprocessors and memory.

The third ingredient is the opening up of the unlicensed band. Before 1997,
for example, a carrier would have to pay a lot of money—in the
billion-dollar range—to the government to have the right to use a bandwidth
of several megahertz for their cellphone service. In 1997, the U.S.
government opened up the 5GHz UNII band that allows unlicensed
users—everybody in the United States—to use up to 550 megahertz of
bandwidth, as long as they follow the rules.

With the availability of wide bandwidth and CMOS technology being advanced
enough to process the bandwidth at this frequency, and with the signal
processing know-how—all this created what I call the “wireless revolution”
that freed us from the previous notion that wireless communication is
expensive, inherently constrained by a low data-rate, and is scarce.
Bandwidth used to be a very scarce commodity, which is not true anymore
with the opening up of unlicensed bands. This is the path Atheros would
like to lead: to change people’s view of wireless service from
tele-communication to more of a data-communication notion where equipment
can be updated very quickly and inexpensively, and basically provide a
level field for competition."

Bob

On Wed, Sep 18, 2019 at 1:33 PM David Lang <david at lang.hm> wrote:

> I had some homerf devices, they were signficantly slower than 802.11b but
> they
> were also far cheaper (they were ~$150 for a card where 802.11b were ~$800
> each)
>
> a few years later the 'junk' vendors started producing 802.11b devices,
> the
> prices dropped, and they caught on.
>
> David Lang
>
>
>
> On Mon, 16 Sep 2019, Dave Taht wrote:
>
> > Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2019 23:46:38 +0100
> > From: Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com>
> > To: Make-Wifi-fast <make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> > Subject: [Make-wifi-fast] 20 year anniversary of wifi
> >
> > I remember experimenting with "homeRF". I cannot remember for the life
> > of me what it was like.
> >
> > and to me, why wifi took off was that it had a strong investment by
> > apple AND heavy interest from the geek community, with a couple
> > drivers that actually worked, and because of the coffee shop
> > phenomenon....
> >
> > Shure, everything else here was important, too:
> >
> > https://www.wired.com/story/how-wi-fi-almost-didnt-happen/
> > --
> >
> > Dave Täht
> > CTO, TekLibre, LLC
> > http://www.teklibre.com
> > Tel: 1-831-205-9740
> > _______________________________________________
> > Make-wifi-fast mailing list
> > Make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net
> > https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/make-wifi-fast
> _______________________________________________
> Make-wifi-fast mailing list
> Make-wifi-fast at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/make-wifi-fast
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.bufferbloat.net/pipermail/make-wifi-fast/attachments/20190919/254343eb/attachment.html>