What is wi fi meaning

What Is Wi-Fi?

Wi-Fi is a wireless networking technology that allows devices such as computers (laptops and desktops), mobile devices (smart phones and wearables), and other equipment (printers and video cameras) to interface with the Internet. It allows these devices—and many more—to exchange information with one another, creating a network. Internet connectivity occurs through a wireless router. When you access Wi-Fi, you are connecting to a wireless router that allows your Wi-Fi-compatible devices to interface with the Internet.

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What does Wi-Fi mean?

Wi-Fi is not an acronym; it is a brand name created by a marketing firm that’s meant to serve as an interoperability seal for marketing efforts.

How does Wi-Fi work?

On the technical side, the IEEE 802.11 standard defines the protocols that enable communications with current Wi-Fi-enabled wireless devices, including wireless routers and wireless access points. Wireless access points support different IEEE standards. Each standard is an amendment that was ratified over time. The standards operate on varying frequencies, deliver different bandwidth, and support different numbers of channels.

What is a wireless access point?

A wireless access point (AP) allows wireless devices to connect to the wireless network. Having a Cisco wireless network makes it easy to bring new devices online and provides flexible support to mobile workers.
What a wireless access point does for your network is similar to what an amplifier does for your home stereo. An access point takes the bandwidth coming from a router and stretches it so that many devices can go on the network from farther distances away. But a wireless access point does more than simply extend Wi-Fi. It can also give useful data about the devices on the network, provide proactive security, and serve many other practical purposes.

What is a wireless router?

Wireless routers are commonly found in homes. They’re the hardware devices that Internet service providers use to connect you to their cable or xDSL Internet network. A wireless router is sometimes referred to as a wireless local area network (WLAN) device. A wireless network is also called a Wi-Fi network. A wireless router combines the networking functions of a wireless access point and a router. Read more about wireless routers.

What is a desktop Wi-Fi router?

The most common way for users to connect to the Internet wirelessly is with a desktop wireless (Wi-Fi) router. These routers look like small boxes with multiple short antennas to help broadcast the signal throughout a home or workplace. The farther a user is from the base Wi-Fi router, the weaker the signal. So multiple wireless routers, called range extenders, usually are placed throughout the workspace. Wi-Fi range extenders, placed in an array, boost or extend Internet coverage.

What is a mobile hotspot?

A mobile hotspot is a common feature on smartphones with both tethered and untethered connections. When you turn on your phone’s mobile hotspot, you share your wireless network connection with other devices that can then access the Internet.

What is portable Wi-Fi hotspot?

A portable Wi-Fi hotspot is a mobile hotspot obtained through a cell phone carrier. It’s a small device that uses cellular towers that broadcast high-speed 3G or 4G broadband signals. Multiple devices, like iPads and laptops, can then connect wirelessly to the device, which in turn seamlessly connects to the Internet where ever you travel. Similar to a cell phone, the portable hotspot’s monthly cost is based on the data usage plan you select. A portable Wi-Fi hotspot is a more reliable way to access the Internet than searching for static public Wi-Fi hotspots.

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What Does WiFi Actually Stand For? A Brief History…

Most people use WiFi every single day. Whether at home, at work, or in your local coffee shop, WiFi networks are used by billions of people every single day. But most people have NO IDEA what WiFi actually stands for. And if they do think they know, they’re usually wrong.

The history of how the name WiFi came to be is actually a rather interesting one. The most interesting aspect about the genesis of the term WiFi is that, contrary to popular opinion, it DOES NOT mean “wireless fidelity” – although plenty of bonafide geeks will argue it does.

So if WiFi doesn’t mean “wireless fidelity” what does it mean? Let’s investigate this further and get to the bottom of the history and meaning of the word WiFi one and for all…

What Does WiFi Stand For?

Most people assume that WiFi stands for “wireless fidelity” but this isn’t actually the case. The word WiFi itself doesn’t actually mean anything. Why? Simple: there is no such thing as “wireless fidelity”. The phrase WiFi was actually coined by marketing people to refer to the technology that powers wireless networks, IEEE 802.11.

Now, IEEE 802.11 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. And it certainly wouldn’t look very nice on big, sprawling marketing campaigns in Times Square and inside glossy, magazine adverts. And this posed a problem. In order to market wireless networks back in the day, the marketing people needed a term that was shorter, sexier, and easy to remember.

Fidelity means – in most cases – loyalty or continued support. Prior to the release of WiFi, internet networks weren’t known for their reliability. WiFi wanted to change this and the marketing people wanted to connote a meaning of trust into the branding of it, so the term Wireless Fidelity was suggested. People liked it, responded well to it in tests, so the name stuck.

But in order to make it look and sound more technical, the term was abbreviated down to WiFi. And the name stuck. But wireless fidelity itself isn’t a thing, it is just a more palatable way of saying IEEE 802.11. And when it comes to marketing, palatable – especially when you’re pushing a new technology – is the name of the game.

What Came Before WiFi?

If you’re old enough to remember a world without WiFi, you’ll know exactly what came before wireless internet. It was called dial-up internet and it worked in much the same way as the internet does now, only with dial-up internet you were stuck at a single terminal – dial-up required a direct connection from the router to your PC.

Dial-up internet worked through your phone line and, for the most part, was painfully slow. How slow? Put it this way: opening an image on dial-up could take as long as five minutes, depending on its size, whereas now images are loaded instantly. Back in the mid to late-90s, though, this was how the internet worked. There was no Google and download speeds were appalling.

Oh, and if someone was using the internet in your home, you couldn’t use the house phone. This fact alone made dial-up internet one of the biggest causes of arguments between parents and teenagers during the years 1995 to 2000. As someone that personally lived through this, I can only tell you that it was problematic.

During the early-2000s, broadband and WiFi began to become more popular, gradually replacing dial-up internet. The jump in speeds from dial-up internet to broadband was significant. In fact, this single change probably generated trillions of dollars alone for the global economies – it made entire economies run faster.

Dial-Up vs Broadband Speeds – What’s The Difference?

Dial-up internet speeds were limited, but not just with respect to its overall speed. Most dial-up routers could only handle internet speeds of 56K, thanks to the nature of telephone systems. But if the internet was to succeed, things had to change. And this is where broadband came into the mix.

With broadband, the internet was delivered in a completely different way – although it still used phone lines. You could browse the internet AND use your house phone. And this new form of internet allowed ISPs to start improving internet speeds by as much as 1000% inside a few short years.

And then, of course, came mobile data for phones, starting with 1G and then progressing to where we are now with the rise of 5G which, inside the next few years, could begin topping previously unheard of speeds, making 4K gaming on the go as easy as streaming a movie at home.

Broadband and dial-up Internet connections differ in a number of ways. While both employ telephone lines, broadband doesn’t share a line with a telephone. Users aren’t deprived of the use of their telephone while using the Internet and there’s no payment to the phone company for the amount of time spent on an Internet connection. In fact, with a broadband connection, the Internet connection is constant – once installed, the connection is never broken, so that all a user needs to do is open a browser window; no time is lost establishing a connection.

ETJ

Faster Internet is Better Internet

What’s the moral of the story here? It’s pretty simple: faster internet, whether you’re talking about it at home or on your phone, is better internet. Speed has always been at the heart of the internet, getting more of it, and the applications and uses that are born from it. Without fast download speeds, we wouldn’t have Netflix streaming or things like YouTube.

And fast internet for your home has never been cheaper either. You can now access ultra-fast broadband for a fraction of the cost that it used to be, unlocking speeds of 1Gbps in some areas. And if you have 1Gbps internet, you’ll never need to worry about speed again.

Internet Slang: A Glossary

WFH	EOBD
KPOP	FOMO
LFWFPB	WDYM
LFG	NFT
HYD	IG
HBU	WiFi
iOS	FUD
TBA	HODL
ASL	XMAS
IYKYK	Yeet
XOXO	NSFW
SMH	IIRC

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What does Wi-Fi stand for?

Wi-Fi became a ubiquitous technology in laptops more than a decade ago and the phrase is in daily use. Now the wireless networking technology can be found in our watches, phones, televisions and smart speakers. We know what it means, but what does Wi-Fi stand for?

You may have read, or made an educated guess, that Wi-Fi stands for “wireless fidelity” just as Hi-Fi stands for “high fidelity”. It would make sense but you’d be wrong.

Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, has comprehensively dispelled the idea: “Wi-Fi doesn’t stand for anything. It is not an acronym. There is no meaning.”

The simple truth is that the organisation needed a name for their standard that would be easier to remember than “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”. So they hired the marketing agency Interbrand to name it and were given the choice of 10 options.

Belanger does concede that the organisation did, in the early days of Wi-Fi, include the tag line “The Standard for Wireless Fidelity”. This was because board members found it hard to imagine having a name that didn’t mean anything and wanted to subsequently explain the name that had been invented for them, but Belanger says it was a mistake to do it, and the line was quickly dropped.

What is Wi-Fi?

For many people the term Wi-Fi is now synonymous with “Internet”. But to be accurate it’s just a wireless connection standard. If you’re using a wireless device then Wi-Fi may be bringing you your internet connection, but it is not the internet.

Wi-Fi is essentially a very advanced digital radio using frequencies between 2 gigahertz and 5 gigahertz in the electromagnetic spectrum, which is around the same area as microwave ovens.

Who invented Wi-Fi?

A wireless network called ALOHAnet was created in 1971 that connected the Great Hawaiin islands. Ethernet and Wi-Fi can trace some of their history back to that.

But it was in 1991 that NCR Corporation (which began as a cash register company) and AT&T (which began as a phone company) created the precursor to Wi-Fi as a way of linking cash registers called WaveLAN.

It became so popular that eventually the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) created the 802.11 standard that we now know as Wi-Fi. In 1999, the Wi-Fi Alliance formed as a trade association to hold the reins of the Wi-Fi trademark.

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