15 Years of Wireless LAN
Wi-Fi Alliance celebrates 15 years of Wi-Fi. Interoperability, ease of use, and innovation have made Wi-Fi one of the greatest success stories of the last century, and Wi-Fi Alliance has an extensive roadmap to carry the technology well into the future.
Since its founding in 1999, the industry organization has been delivering on its vision of seamless connectivity -- evolving its technologies and certification programs to keep pace with the requirements of today's connected world.
Founded by six companies to develop and validate multi-vendor interoperability, Wi-Fi Alliance has grown into an organization of nearly 650 companies and a driving force in Wi-Fi's ascent to one of the world's most-loved and widely used technologies. With billions of devices in use today, Wi-Fi exemplifies the value of industry-wide standards and multi-vendor collaboration to support technology adoption.
"No other technology organization has been more successful than Wi-Fi Alliance in driving industry collaboration for the benefit of users," said Craig Mathias, Principal of Farpoint Group. "The essential ubiquity of Wi-Fi is a key result of the work of the Alliance and its members."
A passion for great technology
Wi-Fi's evolution since 1999 has been marked by continued advancement and a commitment to legacy interoperability. Far from the original 11 Mbps data rate offered in the first Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products, today's most advanced Wi-Fi devices can deliver as much as 1 Gbps of data rate when communicating with other current-generation technology, and can also connect to legacy devices -- preserving value for users over the long term. Just a few years after its proliferation in laptops and access points, and propelled by Wi-Fi Alliance technologies addressing ease of use and quality of service, Wi-Fi proliferated in smartphones and consumer electronics. Device-to-device connectivity was introduced with Wi-Fi Direct, easy-to-use display with Miracast, and seamless access to Wi-Fi hotspots with Passpoint.
At the core of market growth
Today, Wi-Fi is in broad use in homes, enterprises, public spaces and hotspots. Fifteen years since its origin, the numbers are testament to the technology's value:
- More than 22,000 products have been Wi-Fi CERTIFIED, including more than 4,000 phones and tablets, 6,000 access points, 1,100 printers, and 3,500 televisions
- Consumer demand for Wi-Fi has continued to grow, with sales figures of about two billion Wi-Fi devices sold in 2013 alone and a forecast exceeding four billion in 20202
- Wi-Fi is used in 25 percent of homes around the world.
"Many of the most popular cultural trends and technologies from the last 15 years got their start and maintained their popularity because of Wi-Fi," said Kevin Fitchard, Senior Writer at Gigaom. "Wi-Fi has not only been a source of tremendous capacity, but also an incredible driver of innovation." Academic research indicates that the combination of Wi-Fi data offload and the benefits of Wi-Fi-enabled homes created more than US $48 billion in economic surplus in the United States alone.
An exciting future
"Wi-Fi has significantly improved the lives of people and societies all over the world over the last 15 years, but we are just getting started," said Greg Ennis, Vice President of Technology for Wi-Fi Alliance. "Wi-Fi and other technologies from Wi-Fi Alliance will be front and center for many years to come, connecting people and things in ways we can only imagine today."
The Wi-Fi Alliance roadmap features a number of key elements that will support the proliferation of the organization's certified technologies into a number of new segments and applications.
- New frequency bands will deliver just the right kind of connection. WiGig CERTIFIED will deliver interoperable products supporting multiple-gigabit data rates for room-range connectivity in 60 GHz in 2016. Wi-Fi Alliance has also begun work to define certification programs based on 802.11ah and 802.11af, for operation below 1 GHz to support longer-range, very-low-power connectivity.
- Wi-Fi will connect new types of devices to each other and the internet. With the Internet of Everything emerging as the next major wave of connected innovation, Wi-Fi's reach will extend into the smart home, connected cars, sensing and control networks, and much more. Already the technology of choice for its long-lived compatibility and robust security, advances in power management, ease of use, and common foundations for service discovery and enablement are setting the stage for massive growth of the Wi-Fi Internet of Everything.
- Core Wi-Fi technologies will continue to advance. The Wi-Fi that consumers and enterprises have come to rely on every day keeps getting better. Wi-Fi Alliance members are bringing new power saving mechanisms to Wi-Fi CERTIFIED products, improving the mobility experience, and much more. An update to Wi-Fi CERTIFIED ac, the most advanced Wi-Fi available, will validate interoperability of several performance-enhancing features in late 2015.
Senior Member
Posts: 810
Joined: 2008-06-15
Yeah, I remember bad-old-days when 56k modems were the shizzle and a Pentium 90MHz was a high-end processor. I was so very happy when my local ISP rolled out ADSL. Still use it today because, unlike the big cable modem ISPs, the my local ISP doesn't cap or throttle. My upload speeds may be a bit slower but my bandwidth is unlimited and it never slows down. Now they're rolling out fiber but I'll wait until they get all the inevitable kinks in the system ironed out.
One of the derps I've seen my ISP do is to insist on putting the router in the same place as the ODN box (that's the box that turns the fiber optic signal into Ethernet). The ODN box is usually against the interior wall of a basement because that's where the rest of the utility cabinets usually are. Well, the router should be in the centre of the home so the WiFi bubble covers as much of the home as possible. Instead, they put the WiFi router in a place where half of it's bubble is wasted; Not only is half of it's signal being blocked by the concrete and ground that it's pressed up against, but unless you spend most of your time outside (and in this climate people just do not do that) there's no reason to have the router against an exterior wall. This wouldn't be so bad if the ISP would ask the customer where they want the router located, but they don't. Since most cutomers are technologically illiterate they have no idea that locating the WiFi router in a basement against an exterior wall is a bad idea, so they don't ask to have it moved. So much fail.
On the flip side it gives me a bit of extra work installing repeaters and/or moving the router.

As for me, my router is three feet from my workstation and the workstation is in the middle of my home so all my devices are happy and so am I.
Senior Member
Posts: 22107
Joined: 2008-07-14
Have you heard of Amped Wireless before?
http://www.ampedwireless.com/
Ive never used them, but talked to a few people on other forums who say they can get ranges of ridiculous distances with their routers, not just basement to attic, but like streets away type of distances
http://www.ampedwireless.com/family/routers.html
Yeah, the local Bestbuy sells Amped Wireless routers and range extenders. They're ridiculously priced though. Be cheaper to buy a MoCA bridge and run another coax line.
Senior Member
Posts: 19562
Joined: 2010-04-21
Not fancy powerline adapters? Probably the easiest option to cover the whole house, not sure about quality/latency once you run through powerlines though
Member
Posts: 81
Joined: 2009-06-16
At least we don't have those horrible third party wireless clients anymore.
To my understanding Windows didn't have a built in one until one of the Service Pack for Windows XP.
Senior Member
Posts: 19562
Joined: 2010-04-21
Have you heard of Amped Wireless before?
http://www.ampedwireless.com/
Ive never used them, but talked to a few people on other forums who say they can get ranges of ridiculous distances with their routers, not just basement to attic, but like streets away type of distances
http://www.ampedwireless.com/family/routers.html