On Wi-Fi

Wired 10.10: Being Wireless

But 802.11 systems — now available in a variety of flavors, including 802.11b, widely known as Wi-Fi — do not stop at the walls of your home. Depending on the intervening materials, a vanilla Wi-Fi can radiate more than 1,000 feet. Since I live in a high-density area, my system reaches perhaps 100 neighbors. I do not know how many use it (totally free) — frankly, I do not care. I pay a fixed fee and am happy to share.

Because further down the street, beyond the reach of my system, another neighbor has put in Wi-Fi. And another, and another. Think of a pond with one water lily, then two, then four, then many overlapping, with their stems reaching into the Internet. (Credit for the water lily analogy goes to Alessandro Ovi, technology adviser to European Commission president Romano Prodi.)

Look at the numbers: 3G, in its most generous projections, will deliver data speeds of 1 megabit per second — in two years. Today, Wi-Fi commonly provides 11 megabits, offering up to 54 megabits. Which standard do you think will be adopted?

I added a Wi-Fi access point to my home P2P LAN and everything worked right out of the box. The possibilities are liberating. I take my laptop to bed, to the garage, to the backyard...pretty much anywhere I care to work. Build a new desktop PC, add a Wi-Fi NIC, and it goes anywhere there's power. Wireless printing, etc. Meanwhile, the wireless NIC I purchased for my laptop works at school....

Back at home, I let my neighbor in and, voila, broadband for the neighborhood. That's the model Nicholas Negroponte discusses in this article. Frankly, I find it exciting.