Wi-Fi Technology

The New Era Adventure The New Era Adventure

Index
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. Introduction Brief Technical Description Features Applications of Wi-Fi Different Models Available Technical Benefits The User problems it solves Setting up of Wi-Fi Growth of Wi-fi Disadvantages with Wi-Fi Technology Audience for which it is Extended Pricing Availability Some early Adapters Future with Wi-Fi Technology

Introduction To Wi-Fi Technology

The Wi-Fi Technology stands for Wireless Fidelity It is a network without wires. This time it is not wires but the air between them that is being transformed. Over the past three years, a wireless technology has arrived with the power to totally change the game. It's a way to give the Internet wing without licenses, permission, or even fees. In a world where we've been conditioned to wait for cell phone carriers to bring us the future, this anarchy of the airwaves is as liberating as the first PCs - a street-level uprising with the power to change everything.

Brief Technical Description

It works on the basis of broad band network. A box the size of a paperback, and costing no more than dinner for two, magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the size of a football field. A card no larger than a matchbook receives it. The new technology being used is OPEN SPECTRUM.

Features
General Features of Wi-Fi Wi-Fi is cheap,

and, most important, speed it works. A box the size of a

powerful,

paperback magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the size of a football field. A card no larger than a matchbook receives it. The next laptop you buy will probably have Wi-Fi built in. Wires may soon

be for power alone

Applications in Office
WiFi Benefits Time is money, goes the adage. And WiFi helps you save time, tons of it. Apart from saving time, here are the some other inherent WiFi benefits. Its flexible. It leads to the better productivity & the space optimization. The Sharing of files for the office users or the home users makes great its applications to a greater extent.

Applications in Unwiring house

Digital media, from MP3 to DVD, is taking over, but the equipment in most homes is still largely analog. Consumer electronics makers have been unable to come up with a common digital standard to link gear, and even if they did, few consumers want to string networking cable under their couch. Wi-Fi can break this logjam and become the common link that ties together music, video, and even phones around the house, automatically and effortlessly. Then the notion of a central entertainment server, which records TV, stores music and video, and plays it back on any screen in the house, will finally take off. Once the living room is a wirelessly networked digital media hub, the longawaited era of Internet video may arrive, kicking broadband demand into high gear.

Applications in Coverage
Using Wi-Fi to cross the last mile. As consumer electronics start to ship with wireless networking built in, demand will skyrocket for the broadband connections to make it all worthwhile. Which could be another opportunity for Wi-Fi. Currently, getting broadband at home is, at best, an uninspiring choice between the phone company and the cable company - if it's available at all. Wi-Fi hot spots mounted on lampposts or telephone poles, with directional antennas to extend their range and avoid congestion, could offer as good or better service. And the economies of scale of a truly mainstream technology could make it far cheaper than other wireless options. Also, neighborhood Wi-Fi "umbrellas" could employ the miles of unused fiber-optic cable that are a legacy of the telecom bubble, effectively bridging the otherwise expensive "last mile" from the main telecom networks to individual homes.

Application in convergence with the Cell phone

Finally, once there's widespread Wi-Fi in the home, the neighborhood, and enough public spaces, wireless convergence starts to make sense. Today, it's not uncommon to find consumers who are fully wireless: a cell phone outside the home, cordless phones within, and a Wi-Fi network for data. Yet, while some of these devices share the same frequencies (cordless phones and Wi-Fi both use the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands), they are based on different standards and can't talk to each other. Bringing them together is just a matter of time. Wi-Fi, especially in higher-speed incarnations, is as capable of transmitting voice as any cordless phone, and because calls travel over the Internet rather than over a phone network, they are far cheaper. By the same token, several companies are planning to add Wi-Fi to cell phones, allowing users to make calls over the Internet when in Wi-Fi range. The dream to emerge from this is a single device that moves seamlessly from home to road, using the best network available wherever it is. It's this vision of convergence that has the smarter telcos reconsidering their 3G plans in light of the Wi-Fi boom. There are many parts that still must come together, but it is not hard to imagine a day when the Internet really is everywhere, just in different strengths and price tiers depending on the cost of the underlying infrastructure. Your phone might be free to use at home and in the office, cheap in your neighborhood and downtown, free again at a caf trying to boost business, and relatively expensive on the highway. Most of those would be Wi-Fi networks, with cell phone service as a seamless but costly fallback, like analog roaming is for digital phones today.

Applications for Aerodromes

The notion that wireless users, like airplanes in a landing pattern, need to be fenced off by themselves is an anachronism, a throwback to the days of analog. Radio signals are not like physical objects, which cannot occupy the same space at the same time without a crunch. Electromagnetic waves pass through one another effortlessly, and they can be extracted from a sea of other signals, even on the same frequency bands. The trick is knowing what you're looking for.

The Different Models Available

Wi-Fi is known formally as 802.11. There are actually three standards, denoted by letters appended to the numbers: 802.11a 802.11b 802.11g. The three differ in speed. Wi-Fi runs at 11 megabits per second (Mbps). That's the advertised rate, anyway. It can be affected by interior walls, distance from the signal, phases of the moon and so on.

The 802.11b Model

The standard that started it all. Seeking to invent a speedy way to send data via unlicensed airwaves, engineers working on a standard for wireless local-area networks borrowed from existing technologies - Ethernet's data packets, the Internet's routing protocols, and spread spectrum's use of many channels within a frequency band. The result is information delivered at speeds up to 11 Mbps in the 2.4-GHz band, and at a range of about 300 feet. In 1999, an industry group wisely decided to give it a more friendly name and settled on the retro-chic Wi-Fi, for wireless fidelity .

The 802.11a Model

Finalized four years ago, 802.11a works in the 5- to 6-GHz band at speeds of up to 54 Mbps. Products based on the standard were first introduced in late 2001. Its strengths: high speed and lower risk of radio frequency interference than either 802.11b or 802.11g. Its weakness: a is incompatible with the more popular b and the emerging g, because it strayed from the 2.4-GHz band. As a result, some manufacturers have quit building products for it. But as WLANs proliferate, it could prove essential to serving large populations in concentrated area, such as downtowns, universities, and business centers.

The 802.11g Model

The much-anticipated 802.11g has already been revised six times; approval is expected in mid2003. It promises complete inter-operability with b and transmission rates up to five times faster in the same 2.4-GHz band. Early products are already on the market from Wi-Fi heavyweights such as Apple, Linksys, Netgear, and D-Link. Among the challenges for g: higher vulnerability to radio frequency interference from other 2.4-GHz devices, such as late-generation cordless phones.

 Open Spectrum As big as it is, Wi-Fi is just the start of something even bigger: A set of "open spectrum" technologies that could rewrite the rules of the airwaves, reversing a century of regulatory policy and enabling an explosion of new wireless devices and services.

Technical Benefits

Wired Illustrator
Open spectrum technologies cut through the noise rather than requiring regulatory protection from interference. One key technique is spread spectrum, a way to transmit over many frequencies simultaneously; if some channels are blocked, others will let data through. Wi-Fi spreads its signal over 14 channels on the 2.4-GHz band.

 Two technologies have made that easier. The first is spread spectrum, which is a way of scattering a transmission around over many narrow frequencies, shotgun-style. Even if some are drowned out by interference, others will still get through - noise is rarely evenly distributed. And because the receiver knows the sequence of frequencies that the transmissions will be coming in, it can ignore those arriving at different times. The second is digital radio, which can break up a transmission into Internet-like packets with addresses. DR receivers pay attention only to the packets meant for them, allowing many devices to use the same frequencies. Add error correction and the ability to resend any part of a message that is lost, and you have radios that can cut through the noisiest environments and share airwaves with hundreds of nearby transmitters.

The user problems it solves

Flexibility With a wireless network we and our staff can have uninterrupted access to people, information and tools as we and they move through the workplace with our mobile PC. Responsiveness - As we change our business operations, our wireless network can change with us. Customized. Our wireless network can be configured the way We want it-even combined with our current wired network

 Fast - From 11 to 54 Mbps throughput and advanced roaming capabilities provide reliable access to e-mail, the Internet, file sharing and other network resources away from the desk. Cost-effective - Expand and extend the existing network by simply adding more adapters and access points. Planning is a no brainer as we need to buy only what we need. Secure - Current standards utilize 64- and 128-bit WEP encryption to help guard the network from intruders and protect data in transit. Add in technology and we have increased WLAN protection important for mission-critical data. In addition to the "hard" benefits of increased efficiency, productivity, manageability, and cost savings, wireless networks will certainly make a This is a technology savvy company statement to the world.

Wi-fi is not same as 2.5G & 3G .Speed !

The latter two are telephone standards, which, among other things, offer easy Web access. These systems are widely available. Several companies Sprint, AT&T Wireless and Verizon, to name a few offer this service. If your provider has service where you travel, you can access the Internet. So what's the big difference? Speed! The telephone standards allow you to download data at 40 to 70 kilobits per second (Kbps). Wi-Fi can download at the speed of a cable modem or T1 line. So, if the facility that is providing WiFi service uses a T1 line, the download will probably run 1.5 Mbps. Look at it this way: It's the difference between a 56K modem and really fast broadband.

The setting up of Wi-fi

No software needed to be installedyou just have to point your browser at an address, Voila, up came a configuration wizard, which will ask you some very simple questions just click way through accepting the defaults. Then switch on notebook (which has a built-in wireless card, as some of the newer notebooks do). And you will be connected wirelessly, and able to browse the Internet, check mail, and chat with friends. That is really all it takes. The whole process takes about 5 minutes. Sure, there is fine-tuning you can do (secure the network, for example) but to get me going, this was all it took. A typical SOHO setup does not require much in terms of bandwidth. The typical wireless network runs at 11 Mbps (thats mega BITS per second), being the most common wireless standard (802.11b) until yesterday. Today, the recently blessed 802.11g standard is the hot item on the market at 54 Mbps. Consider that in most cases, your cable/DSL Internet connection isnt going to be much faster than 64 or 128 kbps, 11 Mbps should see you through for years to come.

The growth of Wi-Fi

In the United States, there are thousands of Wi-Fi installations around the country, and the number continues to balloon. A few are free, run by altruistic individuals. Many others are run by businesses such as hotels, restaurants and coffee shops, to attract business. Most charge for access. There are several networks of Wi-Fi installations. T-Mobile operates 2,256 locations, known as hotspots. Each hotspot accesses the Internet though a T1 line. According to its Web site, T-Mobile has several plans and is aiming specifically at the business traveler. It has hotspots in Starbucks coffeehouses, airport lounges and Borders Books & Music stores. Another large network is Boingo Wireless. It doesn't own its hotspots. Rather, it contracts with people who already have them. Boingo has arranged for more than 1,200 hotspots, most located in hotels and restaurants. They range from DSL hookups at 385 Kbps to T1 lines.

The Disadvantages
Wi-Fi isn't necessarily easy to find. So why doesn't everyone use Wi-Fi? Despite the growth of the networks, access can still be a problem. Once you get outside airports, restaurants, coffee shops and hotel lobbies, there isn't much service. The telephone-based systems are much more widely available. So, if you're at the airport, you probably have access to Wi-Fi. But if you're moseying through Stuck, Wash., or Scratch Ankle, Ala., you'll most likely need a telephone system. That could change. Cometa Networks, a consortium of AT&T, IBM and Intel, promises to build 20,000 hotspots by the end of 2004. Cometa is a wholesaler; it plans to sell the hotspots to retailers. It has a pilot program at 10 McDonald's restaurants in Manhattan. There, you get an hour of Internet access with an Extra Value Meal. Other companies also have announced big plans. Boosters talk of wall-to-wall Wi-Fi someday. "Someday" is the operative word; hotspots can be few and far between today.

We cannot secure Wi-Fi connections. Wi-Fi has a security standard Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). WEP encrypts data, but the key, which is used to encrypt and decrypt, is relatively easy to break. An expert hacker snooping on you 10 feet away could break your encryption. A new encryption standard, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), is in the works. It is expected to be much more secure than WEP. Microsoft recently updated Windows XP to handle WPA. But Wi-Fi providers still must implement WPA. T-Mobile is frank about warning that its data signal is broadcast in the open and clear. Passwords and usernames are encrypted. Other than that, you're on your own. T-Mobile encourages customers to use virtual private networks (VPNs). VPNs are software programs that use the Internet. But they are password-protected and use 128-bit encryption, which is virtually unbreakable. Corporations usually set up VPNs, which provide a secure tunnel into a company server. The data still could be intercepted, but it would be unreadable without the encryption key. Boingo Wireless also encourages customers to use a VPN. And it provides a VPN for users who do not already have one, greatly enhancing security. The Boingo VPN sends the encrypted data to a Boingo server, which decrypts it and sends it to its destination over the Internet. Small firms can buy VPN software to set up their own security. There are a number of manufacturers, two of which are Watchguard Technologies and SonicWALL.

Wi-Fi is geared for the more adept computer users. Wi-Fi is not for the uninitiated. For example, Boingo customers cannot access T-Mobile's network, or vice versa. That means when you travel, you must carefully plan your Web jaunts. It's as if you had to sign up with different telephone companies to be sure of having a connection. Boingo and T-Mobile have begun working together. They plan to make mutual access available someday. But that inconvenience is nothing compared to the possibility of being hacked. If you want to surf the Internet at an airport, you should be OK. But someone nearby using specialized software could watch your transmissions, unless you are using a VPN. Even using a password to enter your business or personal mailbox could be dangerous. Only you can decide if Wi-Fi is safe enough for your situation. A huge criminal business has been built on stolen identities. If you are transmitting data in the clear, someone could be watching.

Audience for which it is Extended

Frequent Travelers More than one user Sharing of files Better optimization of network Fast use of internet Busy Assignments

Pricing
ACCESS POINT: The 54 Mbps 802.11g standard is the way to go. This DWL- 2000AP will be available in July for Rs 11,900. Until then, D-Links 802.11b (11 Mbps) device, DWL-900AP+, is Rs 8,250. Just plug it into your network, configure it in a few minutes, and your wireless network is up and running. PC CARD: You need one for each laptop that is not already WiFi enabled (the new Centrinos already areSamsungs X10, IBMs X31 and T40, etc). D-Links DWL-G650 (802.11g) will cost around Rs 5,950 (July); for now, the DWL-650+ (802.11b) is Rs 4,650. Just plug it into your XP laptop, install the driver if youre prompted to, and youre all set. PCI CARD: In case you want to wireless enable some desktop PCs as well, you need one of these: Rs 6,300 for this 802.11g card.

Availability
There are various vendors for the above mentioned products such as CISCO, DLINK,LINKSYS, SMC etc. The products related to 802.11b are readily available in the Indian market and very soon the product line of 802.11g model would also be available for marketing.

Some Adapters of Wi-Fi Technology in India

Some Early Adopters Oberoi Hotels Year of Implementation: 2002 Nature of Project: Wireless Local Area Network for Oberoi Hotels (Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, Chennai & Kolkata) The hotel has implemented a WLAN network and the guest can access Internet across Guest Rooms, Restaurants, Lobby and Swimming pool area. The project supports about 1,000 wireless users roaming in the hotel premises. About 227 Symbol AP 4121 access points have been deployed across the group. System Integrator: Allied India Users: Mostly foreign guests Charges: Minimum Rs 200 (one hour), maximum Rs 800 (one day) in Mumbai Time taken: 90 days

 Wipro
Year of Implementation: 2003 Nature of project: Wireless deployment in Wipro Campus Given the increasing mobile/home/laptop user numbers in Wipro, a need was felt to enable these users to access the net anywhere, anytime in the campus. Wipro deployed 18 Ciscos Aironet Access Points across the campus to deliver access to its employees. After the success of the project, Wipro is planning to extend the wireless services to common areas/cafeteria/ lobbies and conference rooms in all offices across the globe in a phased manner. System Integrator: Wipro Infotech Users: Wipro employees Benefits: Better productivity and space optimization Time taken: Two days

Future with Wi-Fi Technologies

Wi-Fi will become a universal standard, found everywhere in the electronics world. It will show up in consumer electronics devices, from videogame consoles to music players. Cell phones will have it, as will PDAs and digital cameras. Any PC bought in a year or so will instantly become the hub of a wireless network, simply by turning it on. The numbers will quickly reach true mass-market levels: an estimated 99 million people with Wi-Fi by 2006 .

From:-

PANKAJSHARMA