What is Wi-Fi and how does it work?

What does WiFi stand for?

Each and every day, day-in and day-out, the number of Wi-Fi users have increased considerably over the period of time. Therefore it is necessary for us to know what Wi-Fi really is and its working. You may be using wifi on a daily basis but many will be surprised when asked the abbreviation of it. Wi-fi stands for "Wireless Fidelity".

History of Wi-Fi

In 1971, ALOHA net connected the Hawaiian Islands with a UHF wireless packet network. ALOHA net and the ALOHA protocol were the early users of Ethernet and later the IEEE 802.11 protocols, respectively. Vic Hayes is known to be the "Father of Wi-Fi". The original version of IEEE 802.11 protocol was released in 1997. It had specified net bit rates of 1 or 2(mb/s), and later on it went on increasing its speed as it was getting popular, and the present revised version is the 802.11 in 2016.

How Wi-Fi works?

Wi-Fi is a new technology which makes use of radio waves to provide network connectivity. A Wi-Fi connection is established between a wireless router and any Wi-Fi enabled device.

Wi-Fi is a type of electromagnetic radiation, which does not even require any medium to travel like air, Wi-Fi wave length is about 12cm, waves are relatively big when compared to other rays, sometimes the speeds may be reduced as the waves are objected to walls when in rooms. Interestingly Wi-Fi paint is available which blocks other signal which interfere with your Wi-Fi signals. It carries a set of instructions, which tells the device to what to do to each pixel on your screen, the instruction will turn into a code which only needs two different modes on/off. For ex: the code may be
off-off-off-off-off-off = A
on-off-off-off-off-off = B
on-on-off-off-off-off = C
to transmit any picture, it requires huge amount of on/off signals and for a video even more, luckily electromagnetic radiations travel at speed of light 670616629mph, that's why the videos can be transferred super quickly. Those two different states of on and off can be coded into the wave in a lot ways, for Wi-Fi each sent signal has a six digit code and a change in height, and the starting pace of the wave to tell whether the digit is on/off between gaps of those signals.
once configured, WiFi provides connectivity to your devices by emitting frequencies between 2.4GHz-5GHz, based on the amount of data on the network.