How does wireless internet work

This not only provides a wireless Internet access point for each of the laptops, but also provides a very effective firewall that will protect them from hackers and viruses, by effectively creating a private network. Without cables, the laptops are free to move around, linked wirelessly to your own private WiFi network sometimes called IEEE To create wireless connectivity, we intentionally transmit invisible radio frequency RF energy.

We do this for one reason, to carry the information from your computer to the Internet and from the Internet to your computer. The RF energy can be transmitted throughout a building.

It passes through walls and most non-metallic objects, and allows you to couple into it in many places. This will tell you when you have a sufficiently strong signal - and it will often give you the name of the network that the signal belongs to. Find a place where you have a strong reliable signal. To get RF energy to carry information, the information is put onto the carrier at one end, and taken off at the other.

To get RF energy to carry information you need to superimpose the information onto it. At the other end, where you receive this RF energy, the RF carrier needs to be de modulated. This is how you recover the information that was modulated on to the RF at the transmitting end. A Modem modulates the RF carrier at the transmitting end of the wireless link and demodulates it at the receiving end. You need a Modem at both ends of a wireless link because each end both transmits and receives.

Instead of just asking how does wireless Internet work we could have included wired Internet , because this section is common to both. It also helps to answer the question, how does the Internet work? Before information is put onto the RF carrier or through a cable it needs to be prepared — packaged in a special way. Each packet contains a fixed amount of information. As well as the useful information we want to send or receive, it contains other operational information, such as that needed to ensure that the packet is delivered to the right place.

Packets of information are sent from one place to another — actually, from one address to another. It almost always takes many packets to transport the information, as there will almost always be far too much to fit in one packet.

Packets are sorted and sent in the best direction. The Internet is a large interwoven network of networks. There are many routes that packets being sent from the same place could take, and yet still reach the same destination. But, like roads, some are more direct, and faster than others.

A router takes each packet and decides the best route to send it. The router might send some packets one way and others by a different route. Packets may be directed through several different routers before they reach their destination.

In the same way that a conventional mail delivery van can be diverted around road works, packets can be diverted around a traffic jam on the Internet. It may just take a little longer. A wireless access point enables several computers to wirelessly share access to the Internet through a single connection.

To do this, each of your portable computers will need to have a compatible Before your computer sends a packet of information to the Internet, the address that the packet is being sent from is put on the packet.

The packet will have another address too… to tell the router where to send it. This address is a unique one-of-a-kind number, formatted something like this… xxx. We're now moving toward IPV6 addresses Computers and other hardware devices can only handle numbers, but we find names easier to remember.

You can think of these radio frequencies as working similarly to sound waves — higher frequencies travel shorter distances and are easily obstructed, while lower frequencies travel further and can penetrate most obstacles. High frequencies are more prone to signal strength reduction when passing through solid objects. Higher frequency internet can carry more information but only at shorter distances, meanwhile lower frequencies may be slower and carry less, but can go further and get beyond some obstacles.

This means that in a rural area, the further you are from a tower the slower your connection will be and the less data it can support as it will have to depend on lower frequencies to create a connection. Internet towers emit multiple frequencies simultaneously, and just like scanning the radio to find a station, your modem scans the available frequencies in your area to find a clear connection. The tower and modem test back and forth to find the optimum frequency for efficient communication, to get you access to the internet.

These are the frequencies that have been made publicly available across New Zealand for internet use, and are auctioned off by the government to the major telecommunication companies. The government is currently in the process of auctioning off additional wavelengths to accommodate the 5G network and create greater capacity for New Zealanders.

And why does it cost so much for rural data? New tower sites are prioritised by the number of people they can service since this feeds directly into paying off the investment required to install it. The more people in an area, the more towers that can be built, and the greater the available bandwidth for those residents. This explains why smaller and remote rural areas have higher costs and lower data caps than the city — although they are sharing their connection with fewer neighbours, they also have fewer towers servicing their area since the return on investment is likely to be negative for the telecommunications company doing the installation.

To solve this issue for rural customers, the government created the Rural Broadband Initiative RBI to subsidise the cost of building internet towers in rural locations across New Zealand. You can read more about the programme here. You probably already have a modem in your home — that small blinking box plugged into the wall that translates the internet from cables to WiFi.

Where you place your modem is important, as discussed here. Keep it somewhere high, away from solid obstructions like concrete walls or metal cabinets. Let's say you're standing on a pier watching waves come in. As you look down at the waves you can see the crest of each wave roll on by. If you counted how many seconds between each wave crest this would be the frequency of the waves. So if the time between each crest was 1 second that would meant the wave frequency was 1 hertz or one cycle per second.

Comparing sea waves to Mhz and Ghz, these waves are moving at 1 million and 1 billion cycles per second in the air! And to receive the information found in these waves, your radio receiver needs to be set to receive waves of a certain frequency.

For WiFi this frequency happens to be 2. These waves are very similar to the frequency found in your microwave! Your microwave uses 2. This is why some people with old or faulty microwaves experience a problem with their WiFi signal when they try to make popcorn. Just to clear up a popular misconception: These microwaves are non-ionizing radiation.

That means that they do not cause cancer.