Wireless Networks: How Do They Work? – Skyferia Tech
It’s well known that computers transmit information digitally, using binary code: ones and zeros.
This translates well to radio waves, since those 1s and 0s can be represented by different kinds of beeps. These beeps are so fast that they’re outside the hearing range of humans.
It works like Morse code, which is a way to transmit the alphabet over radio waves using dots (short beeps) and dashes (long beeps).
Morse code was used manually for years via telegraph to get information from 1 place to another very quickly. More importantly for this example, though, it is a binary system, just as a computer system is.
Wireless networking, then, can be thought of as a Morse code for computers.
You plug in a combined radio receiver and transmitter, and the computer is able to send out its equivalent of dots and dashes (bits, in computer-speak) to get your data from here to there.
You might wonder how the computer can send and receive data at high speed without becoming garbled nonsense.
The key to wireless networking is how it gets around this problem.
First, wireless transmissions are sent at very high frequencies, which allows more data to be sent per second. Most wireless connections use a frequency of 2.4 gigahertz (2.4 billion cycles per second) — a frequency similar to mobile phones and microwave ovens.
However, this high frequency produces a wavelength that is very short, which is why wireless networking is effective only over short distances.
Wireless networks also use a technique called “frequency hopping.” They use dozens of frequencies, and constantly switch among them.
This makes wireless networks more immune to interference from other radio signals than if they transmitted on a single frequency.
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