By Sean Wilcoxson
The world of Wi-Fi has come a long way since its inception 11 years ago. Today there are over 700 million users with 1 billion devices hooked up to it increasing at a rate of 8 million new devices a year. Stores everywhere offer the easy use of Wi-Fi with 750,00o hot spots around the globe; getting plugged in and surfing the net on your phone, laptop, iPod, and iPad makes business, communication, and life better.
Life keeps on getting better with the new concrete technology of Wi-Fi Direct.
Wi-Fi Direct offers peer-to-peer(P2P) connections between your devices without a traditional Wi-Fi access point or network. In other words, you can connect right to a friends portable game system like PSP and play a game real-time as long as you are within 200 yards of each other. Or you can send a picture from your camera that has Wi-Fi Direct to a digital picture frame or printer, instantaneously.
This is perfect for a businessman or a salesman who has a laptop or smartphone with Wi-Fi Direct enabled to publish a presentation right to the customer’s office without any wires or physical connections. How easy is that!
A little history of Wi-Fi:
The first ever wireless Internet network showed up at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh six years before it spread all over the world in 1999. Most colleges now how access to wireless networks.
The name Wi-Fi stands for Wireless Fidelity, like Hi-Fi or High Fidelity audio equipment, and does not mean anything at all. It is just a little catchier than the actual name: “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”. It was coined by a company who worked for the W-Fi Alliance. People see the name Wi-Fi everywhere and it has become the standard for internet connectivity because of its interoperability. That means that two or more systems can exchange information, and with the use of Wi-Fi it is done simply over wireless networks.
What about security?
Wi-Fi Direct is so new that the drawbacks and glitches are yet to be discovered, a trial and error technology, but the advantages are vast. The makers behind the new technology say that Direct is saturated in security protocol and is protected enough to stop attacks. Others disagree, because any device can become and access point. You will just have to have faith since it is so new and coming out into the world. We shall see what happens in the future with this technology.
This is a technology that has unlimited possibilities for business, pleasure, and everything in between when it comes to access and communication. Imagine, no more will you have to suffer the music of Starbucks just to get to your email, or put up with limited access because of a weak connection.