Overview of Wireless Communications

Wireless communications is a huge field, encompassing everything from radio and television broadcasting through pagers, mobile phones, and satellite communications. The field of mobile phones is expanding very fast at the same time that standards and protocols are being adopted, used, updated, and sometimes discarded. The other rapidly expanding part of the wireless world is that of wireless local area networks (LANs). Driven by widespread acceptance of the IEEE 802.11 standard, wireless local networking for computers and other devices is spreading rapidly.

Although wireless may seem like a special case, it is actually more intuitive and more natural than wired networking. Some day soon the need to plug a laptop into a network physically will seem quaint and antiquated. The notion that you could walk into a room with your cell phone and have it unable to interact with other devices in the room will seem unbelievably primitive. The future will reveal that wirednetworks are the special case.