BRIEF HISTORY
How did wireless get here? Some may see the works
of great scientists like Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla,
and even Ben Franklin as the beginning of wireless
communications. Or perhaps it began with Guglielmo
Marconi, influenced by all these other greats, who first
demonstrated a wireless telegraph system for the British
government in July 1896 and later transmitted Morse
code across the Atlantic in 1901. But it was Reginald
Aubrey Fessenden who realized that the spark-generated
transmission systems, used by Marconi and others for
receiving wireless telegraphy signals, were not suitable
for voice transmission. Inspired by watching the ripples
in a pond caused by dropping a pebble in the water, he
developed a continuous-wave (CW) carrier method, a
fundamental of radio wave physics still in use today. He
broadcast his first music and
voice program on Christmas
Eve in 1906 from Brant Rock,
Massachusetts. This event is
considered by most historians
as the birth of radio broadcast
and the real starting point to
communicating today with just
about anything that has an on/
off switch. Wireless connectivity
has become as inescapable as electricity had become
about 100 years ago.
The next big step
in wireless LANs
is 802.11ax.
Sending sound (i.e., voice and audio) over the
airwaves was just the beginning, followed by the
first television broadcast in 1928; invented by Philo
Farnsworth who added video and pictures to wireless.
Subsequently, the first digital transmissions over
wireless were likely around the time of the first modem
in 1958. Because telephone trunks were already being
transmitted through microwave systems, modem
connections transmitting data at 300 bits per second
would have technically been the first wireless data
connections. Some may argue that earlier acoustical
couplers were transmitting data, implying that the
earliest microwave systems built in the late 40s could
have been carrying data. However, wireless networking
that is more closely related to today did not start to take
shape until near the end of the 20th century. This is
8 I ICT TODAY
when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) first began working on the 802.11 family of
standards, which set the stage for wireless technology
defining the new millennium. Although the methods
of carrying data over telephone trunks through short
and long-haul microwave has gone away, microwave and
millimeter wave technologies are more advanced and
more common than ever.
WIRELESS TODAY
Information has been transmitted through the air for
well over a century, but it has only been since the dawn
of the 21st century that wireless technology has become
such a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Very few people
can get through a day without receiving some type of
information that got to them by traveling invisibly over
the airwaves. It is almost all
digital today, but it is still an
analog radio wave or light wave
that is carrying images, video,
voice, news, apps, and anything
else one can think of to hold in
the palm of a hand.
This evolution has been
fueled largely by consumer
demand, but it has depended on
the continuing development of international standards
to create interoperability and compatibility. The IEEE
has been involved with electrical and communications
advancement since before Marconi transmitted his
telegraph over the Atlantic. It is natural that it has
continued to be instrumental in the development of so
many technologies used today. Although there had been
many wireless technologies developed earlier, the first
real international standards for wireless networking came
through the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group
with its first efforts published in 1997. The standards were
based largely on technologies and methodologies that had
already been widely deployed, such as direct-sequence
spread spectrum (DSSS), frequency hopping spread
spectrum (FHSS) and orthogonal frequency-division
multiplexing (OFDM). It was the first endeavor to create
true compatibility for and across all manufacturers. This
was the beginning of today’s wireless world.