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

[Dave Taht]

Great article, bob, thx!

People *wanted* wireless freedom. Everybody had a laptop and a modem,
and a pcmcia slot. One business model that lasted only briefly was
coffee shops renting pcmcia cards.....


On Thu, Sep 19, 2019 at 12:10 PM Bob McMahon <bob.mcmahon at broadcom.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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--

Dave Täht
CTO, TekLibre, LLC
http://www.teklibre.com
Tel: 1-831-205-9740