We have only been celebrating World WiFi Day for just 8 years, but technology, at least its seed, has been with us since World War II. The creation of this anniversary has been at the initiative of the Wireless Broadband Alliance and the Connected Community Forum and its objective is to highlight its importance at a global level. Something that, given the figures, seems necessary.
Only 25% of students in rural areas can access remote studies. 80% of homes in poor countries have an internet connection and yet, during the pandemic, the use of WiFi technology also skyrocketed by 80%.
Currently, there are more than 18 billion devices connected to the Internet wirelessly. And the number will double in less than a decade. And it will reach 40 billion in 2033. Almost 90 years after a Hollywood actress sowed the seed of this technology.
Although she was neither an engineer nor a mathematician, Hedy Lamarr had a creative intuition for solving everyday problems. So she created a box to deposit used tissues or a glow-in-the-dark dog collar. But During World War II he tried to prevent communications between the Allies from being discovered by the Germans.. Inspired by her improvisations on the piano, she devised a frequency hopping system that prevented whoever was “listening” from understanding the entire message. Lamarr patented it and proposed it to the army, but the Allies derisively dismissed it. And it took several years for his innovation to be accepted.
In basic terms, WiFi is a technology that allows electronic devices such as computers, printers, tablets, smartphones, smart TVs, multimedia players, surveillance cameras, among others, to connect to each other or access a broadband network, in a way wireless. Although officially Born in 1999 with transmission speeds of up to 11 Mbpstoday reaches 319 million Mbps, almost 30 million times faster.
One of his antecedents, Along with Lamarr’s invention, it is the network created in 1971 by the University of Hawaii,AlohaNet, a pioneering computer networking system. That it was created on an island makes sense: one of the biggest signal blockers is water and, by extension, the human body. Therefore, for your home has a better connection, stay away from the routernot because it is harmful, but because you block it.
Another curious aspect is that it is assumed that WiFi means wireless fidelity, but the reality is that although Wi comes from “wireless”, Fi is just a way to take advantage of the usual pun. “The Wireless Fidelity Standard” was briefly used by the Wi-Fi Alliance (a nonprofit organization that owns and controls the “Wi-Fi Certified” trademarks and logo) as an advertising slogan at the beginning of the dandeach of 2000, but tandcynically it is not what it represents.
And now the future. WiFi technology is based on the emission of waves that can be read by other devices. In the same way that bats and some cetaceans use waves to create a map of space, a team of scientists at the University of Santa Barbara have discovered that the waves they emit routers can be used to create a map of a space, even when hidden by walls or walls. This has not only been used in military technology, it could also be used in disaster rescue operations and also in medicine, to make images of the inside of the human body. But this is just the beginning of a technology that we have only just begun to use.
