What is Home Wireless Networking?

Home wireless networking is just what it sounds like -- a method of producing networks without any wires as part of your home! If this sounds exciting to you, then please read on.

With your house wireless network, you could make radio connections between computers that let them communicate and connect to the Internet without you going all the trouble of connecting all of them with wires. The computers don't even have to have a specific path for that signal, since the wireless signal may go through walls and between floors easily.

Where Did It Come From?

The story of wireless networking is often a rather strange one. It is basically an application of an technology called frequency hopping which was, believe it or not, created by the actress Hedy Lamarr as well as a musician named George Antheil, within the 1940s. Seriously, perform web search -- I promise I'm not pulling your leg here.

They received a patent for invention, which was designed to assist in the war effort. Hedy was Jewish, but have been made to hide it and socialise with Hitler as a young woman -- she had to drug her husband and hightail it to London to leave her native Austria. The importance of what they'd done, however, wasn't recognised until several years later.

The U.S. military adopted the tactic inside '60s, using it in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hedy never saw any money from it because the patent had expired (no problem, she was obviously a film star!), but she was given a Pioneer Award through the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1997, 3 years before her death.

Wireless Network at Home.

When most people talk about wireless networks, they may be talking about wireless LANs (local area networks). A local area network doesn't suggest which it covers your whole neighbourhood -- the 'local area' under consideration can be just one building, including the house. So if you need wireless networking at home, you want a home wireless LAN.

Once people have wireless of their home, they always seem to work as if there was an utter miracle. After years of drilling holes inside the walls and running wires everywhere, suddenly seeing them gone is basically amazing.

Home Wireless Network Myths.

Home wireless networking is expensive. Well, home wireless networking had been expensive if it was new, however the costs came way down thanks to competition and mass production. There are hundreds of manufacturers of wireless equipment, with something for each and every budget. Your costs depends on how many computers you want to connect and how far apart they may be, but a typical family should be capable of singing it at under $100 overall. If you're happy to leave one of many computers on whenever you use the other one, you could do it as low as $20! Best of all, when you have spend the money, you'll find nothing more to pay next.

Wireless networking your house is hard. Again, this myth is often a holdover from your start of wireless. It was previously quite challenging, together with you needing to fiddle endlessly with all the configuration on each computer only to have the simplest things to work. Now, though, windows supports wireless as is also, and configuring it is simpler than in the past. You can usually fire up what you've bought, put the CD in the computer and then sit back and watch it all work perfectly!

A home wireless network is insecure. You might think it's dangerous to get your private data boating within the air for everyone you just read. Well, if you want, it's dead all to easy to enable encryption for your wireless signals. It's already hard for outsiders to intercept wireless signals at all, and they also certainly won't be able to decode them also.

Not Just at Home.

It was home users which were quickest to look at wireless technology, happy to pay any amount to finally be free from having to run wires all over their residence. Since then, though, the technology has began to spread to offices, universities, and many types of other places.

Chains of fast food restaurants and cafes are finding that their customers will stay for a long time whenever they offer wireless Internet access, and it's also more and more common in hotels andairports. This means that once you set up a laptop for wireless, it becomes a lot more portable than it ever was before.