Did You Know Wireless Devices Were This Important in Today's World?

Image courtesy of Jope at Flickr.com

Telecommunication devices have come a long way from the time of smoke signals and notes on a pigeon's foot, but one of the most amazing advances has by far been the possibility of doing all of this without any of the traditional wires needed. Wireless communication does not only refer to smart-phones and Wi-Fi, it is every kind of possible communication where there is a transfer of information or power, but there is no connection whatsoever. The most common and known is the radio, which can be at short-wave and travel only a few meters, or as much as millions of kilometers for deep-space communication. You can find on the list great variety in the different types of communication like two-way radios, PDAs, GPS, garage door openers, wireless gadgets like headphones, keyboards and mice, broadcast and satellite television and of course cell phones and Wi-Fi. If you take a minute and start to really analyze how many of the devices you use on a regular basis are wireless, and not to mention which ones you’ll be using a year from now. Wireless is on the rise while offering consumers a more pleasurable experience without any of the hassle brought on by cables, and receiving the same service. 

We think wireless and of course we immediately think Wi-Fi and the advances there have been with 4G and now 5G communication, which you can read more about on the Don Burns Blogspot page, but it goes beyond that. Wireless communication, believe it or not, started off even before the 1900s when Guglielmo Marconi developed the first wireless telegraph, which started off a wave of other inventions including basic data compression, initial technology behind cellular phones, and radiotelephones during the early 1900s. From there, you could easily list the devices that started popping up in the 50s and 60s from microwave signals and satellites, which were launched into space. Around this time, some associations also started appearing with the purpose of controlling communication as it started to be implemented, among these were: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and the International Telecommunications Satellite Consortium (INTELSAT). In the 80s, you could definitely say there was a boom in technology and it can be said this was the birth of the cell phone, since this is when the technology we know today was refined, leading to the beginning of the “technological wars” that would establish the competition grounds for digital cellular standards in 1989. In the 90s, there’s no surprise when records are broken, and the 10 million milestone was surpassed by cell phone users and the size of the internet just continues to exponentially grow.

The 2000s brought tons of new and interesting advances that now allowed users to interact more than ever. This tech had become such a part of everyday life that in 2009 it was registered that over 6.2 billion minutes were used by clients and more than 5 billion SMS messages were sent per day, all via wireless networks. During these years, was also the creation of the iTunes and the Android Play Store bringing about a brand new way of interacting. Apps on smart phones are now integrated into almost every part of our lives, and it seems that this is not the end of it. From here there was an even more advanced integration, which is the Internet of Things (IoT), allowing users to use the internet networks to communicate with devices around the home, office or city to carry out specific tasks.

Image courtesy of ollierb at Flickr.com

So, even though this was a brief timeline, you need to also realize that there are different types of wireless signals, which will be determined by the device being used. For instance, on a TV you are either using analog video or digital video, whereas on a cell phone you are using voice, be it via analog or digital, 3G, 4G or LTE, Bluetooth, or two-way radio. Satellites can carry all types of signals independent if they carry voice, audio, video or data, or even if they do so through analog or digital. The other consideration is the frequency of the signal, which are all supported by these satellites from 3400 MHz to 23 GHz, or others. Then you Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and finally radio which synchronizes on AM and FM radio. In this whole mix you’ll find devices that could be transmitters, receivers, or transceivers. Each of these will take on a particular role in the wireless communication service: wireless clients (which are the stations that use the connection to interact), access points (which the host of the signal), and Ad-Hoc Nodes (which allow a network of devices to connect to a specific access point).

The list could go on about devices or wireless tech, but at the end of the day the purpose of all of this is maintaining communication as we have the possibility of going mobile. There’s now doubt that there will only continue to be advances in this field in the years to come.