Wireless Technology and Standard : Why Wireless

Bogdan Doinea (9 mins)

Hello everyone and welcome to the “Introduction to Wireless Technology” session.

My name is Bogdan Doinea, I work as an Internet of Things Systems Engineer for Cisco based
in Romania. It is my pleasure today to invite you on a journey to discover the secrets of
wireless technologies.

We got a lot of information to cover. So we're going to structure our topics in five different
phases. We're going to start with talking about why is wireless more and more important. I was
going to phrase this topic :Why is Wireless Important? But if you're anything like me, you
probably have a device right now, if not, even the one you're viewing this recording on, that is
connected through wireless technology.

So I believe the question is not : why wireless is important right now since that it's fairly
obvious, but why is wireless growing to be more and more important for our future?

We're then going to move on to discussing wireless technologies and really give you the basics
of being able to understand the operations inside wireless.

Going to move on to the operations of messages and messaging inside the wireless standards.
Go on with covering the main wireless standards we have gone through until now in history,
starting with the 802.11 and moving through 'a', 'b', 'g' , with the specific focus on 'n' which
really pioneered from a technical point of view, the entire series. And then make a short
analysis and wrap it up by looking at the new kid on the block, which is not really that new, but
still not being used in a lot of places, which is 802.11ac, offering speeds up to 1Gbps.

So let's begin. Why is wireless more and more important? And not just for a technical people,
but for every person in the future and everything that is going to be connected. Wireless is
going to be the critical technology and infrastructure.

I'm going to challenge you to take a look in the mirror, and try to imagine ten years ago in
terms of technology. WiFi was starting to be a popular concept. You started have a module of
WiFi in your laptop and it was pretty cool. You could use WiFi in the meeting room, not
having a network engineer have to install a cable for you to be connected to the Internet. You
had increased mobility, and you were able to surf in a limited area of space.

However, if you moved out your meeting room because the signal wasn't very strong back
then; and neither was the bandwidth that you were using, you would lose the signal. You
would have to obviously moved the wire connection somewhere else. Everything else on the
desk was a wired connection. You got the media server that was there, you got a external hard
drive that was connected as a NAS inside the system, inside the network. You had a wired

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 phone, and not so many places actually had a wireless connection that you could use. However,
even back then it seemed as a very promising technology.

Fast-forward. Five years later, just 2010, five years later. We no longer have the situation
where we have isolated WiFi hotspots, but we have a multiple WiFi environment. We don't
have just it at work, we have it at home because WiFi has reached consumer levels. We have it
in different coffee shops, we have it from the local neighbour if he didn't secure his network
the proper way. And not only do you have to use your laptop as a device that we use to connect
to WiFi, you have several devices, two or three devices.

With the advent of the iPhone in 2007, the revolution of the smart phones began shortly,
followed by the revolution of the tablets. Now you have multiple devices connected to WiFi
networks and you're not even using the WiFi just for web surfing like in the past. You’re using
it for critical applications, work applications and inventing practically the teleworker concept
that has brought our economy so far ahead in terms of IT productions and operations.

Enough of looking into the past. Let's jump to our current present. Let's analyze Sam. Sam is
living today somewhere in the area Barcelona; and Sam likes to be connected all the time. But
Barcelona is a very versatile place to live in. You can be on a boat, you can be in a train. You
can be in a helicopter, you can be somewhere in your office or at home. However, the type of
expectations that we today have on connectivity is to be able to be connected anywhere.

So right now, the evolution of the WiFi centers that we have are far-reaching, powerful in
terms of signal, in terms of bandwidth. You can get WiFi from almost everywhere.

The newer standards 802.11n and 802.11ac have evolved wireless speeds to 1 Gbps. Speeds
that were only comprehensible only few years ago on wired connections. Everyone is using
WiFi for multiple devices for multiple applications.

So is it going to stop here? Where is WiFi going to go in the future? What more can it connect?
Well actually, the more you look at the evolution of technology, the more you realize that it
has a lot of places to go in.

2017 - just two years ahead of us, we got some amazing predictions about the future. Evolution
will be done from the 802.11ac standard to the 802.11ad. This is going to offer us 7 Gbps
wireless speed. You heard me correct - 7Gbps. And try not to get lost right now in these kind
of naming conventions of 802.11 ac or ad. We're going to get deeper and deeper understanding
where exactly these numbers are coming from, but try to get the big picture - that wireless is
increasing in speed because we need this technology to increase in speed.

For 2017, we're looking at Smart Housing concept - Smart Living Room concept. We have
your media server that can stream -not just connect, but live stream from your TV, laptop,
phone, or tablet. We're going to have multiple spatial frequency streams in your living room.
They're going to connect everything for multiple users and everybody living inside the house
over really high bandwidth.

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 Not only that, but in my field - in the “Internet of Things” field, things are incredibly exciting.
We're looking at connecting hundreds of millions, even billions of new devices to the Internet.
And these new devices are not the traditional things you connect to the Internet. They're not
laptops, they're not tablets, they're not smart phones, they're not smart watches. They're battery
power sensors, they're gas meters, different tools used in hospitals, different equipment to
monitor distribution of electrical current in a city.

These are real time critical applications that you cannot possibly connect over wire connections
simply because it doesn't scale. It costs too much to connect tens of billions of new devices
over wires. You're going to pollute the entire planet with wires.

Wireless is definitely going to become more and more interesting as we try to connect the
entire world, as we try to change the way that we live, we work, and we play in an "Internet of
Everything" connected world. By 2020, the predictions are that we are looking at 50 billions
connected devices.

Right now smartphone and tablet adoption is growing a whopping 70% annually, and this
technology has been around for the last eight years, and is still growing massively to all the
parts of he world.

In 2014, if you look at the statistics, more than 60% of network devices shipped without wired
port.

Is wireless going to be important for the future? I think it’s going to be the main connectivity
technology we're going to be using for the future.

Welcome to the Wireless Course. This is going to be a critical skill that you're going to be able
to use for your future professional development, employment and actual job practice.

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