Absolute Beginner's Guide to Wi-Fi® Wireless Networking

Chapter 2. Understanding Wi-Fi

In this chapter

• The free spectrums that Wi-Fi uses for its transmissions

• The various variants of the 802.11 standard that collectively make up Wi-Fi

• Other (non-Wi-Fi) wireless standards and how they relate to Wi-Fi

• Transmission speeds

You don't have to understand a whole lot about Wi-Fi to be able to make good use of it. Therefore, this chapter does not go into a great deal of technical detail about the various Wi-Fi standards. You'll find some of the gory, geeky details in Appendix A, “Wireless Standards,” if you really need to know.

Still, there are a number of good reasons for you to have some basic understanding of how wireless technologies work and the alphabet soup of standards they use. A little information ...