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Speaker 1: Hi there, Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polettiman,
Speaker 1: editor here and How Stuff Works and with me is
Speaker 1: the best writer on the staff. Jonathan Strickland darn tuton.
Speaker 1: I hoped you wouldn't notice anyway. Today we are going
Speaker 1: to talk about wireless connectivity. Yes, uh, specifically, we're looking
Speaker 1: at WiFi and y max terms you've probably heard, maybe
Speaker 1: you're a little familiar with them, but they can be
Speaker 1: a little confusing. UM and WiFi has been in the
Speaker 1: news recently because there were there were a lot of
Speaker 1: cities that planned on rolling out municipal WiFi networks for citizens.
Speaker 1: Now a lot of them have them for for emergency services,
Speaker 1: but several cities were planning on having these available for
Speaker 1: for anyone to use. UM basically any time you would
Speaker 1: be walking around town with your computer. Maybe you're on
Speaker 1: a business trip, for example, and you stop to UH
Speaker 1: to grab some lunch, sit out on a park bench.
Speaker 1: You could open up your laptop and check your email.
Speaker 1: You know it's you know, while you're out on the
Speaker 1: on the on the go. You don't have to be
Speaker 1: at an office or at a coffee shop. You would
Speaker 1: basically be on the street able to to connect with
Speaker 1: your smartphone or your laptop computer. It seems like could
Speaker 1: be a great idea. Unfortunately, one by one these cities
Speaker 1: have been kind of abandoning these plans um and recently
Speaker 1: this is from the Orange County Register UH the Orange
Speaker 1: County in California, not the one in Florida. UH. Anaheim.
Speaker 1: The Anaheim City Council voted on July twenty nine to
Speaker 1: stop their program with earth Link. Earth Link was one
Speaker 1: of the major providers for these kind of municipal WiFi
Speaker 1: initiatives and and like I said, they've all been kind
Speaker 1: of crumbling over the last year and a half or so. UM.
Speaker 1: This was one of the last larger cities to to
Speaker 1: try and implement municipal WiFi to to fold. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of um, A lot of people are kind of
Speaker 1: thinking of this as as the death knell for municipal WiFi. Now,
Speaker 1: now we should go ahead and say that WiFi in
Speaker 1: general is not in danger. We're talking about trying to
Speaker 1: create a citywide network of WiFi. UM. So it looks
Speaker 1: like those it looks like people were rushing into these
Speaker 1: plans without really thinking them out all the way through
Speaker 1: and specifically thinking about how do they make enough money
Speaker 1: to support the plan and make a profit. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: a lot of these these networks that they had set
Speaker 1: up basically had sort of if you will, two tiers pricing.
Speaker 1: One would be free. You know, anybody could do that,
Speaker 1: but a lot of a lot of the networks that
Speaker 1: offered a free option. Uh, the connectivity was sort of iffy.
Speaker 1: Uh from the reports I've read, it was slow, um.
Speaker 1: And you could upgrade, you could pay to have access
Speaker 1: to this this network like you would at a coffee
Speaker 1: shop or a bookstore, um, you know, hotel, someplace where
Speaker 1: you had to have something to get you in the
Speaker 1: door of the network if you will. Um. But you know,
Speaker 1: people weren't necessarily signing up for that. And if you
Speaker 1: think about it, if you if you have a wireless
Speaker 1: network at home, UM, you know, these these UH routers
Speaker 1: don't really have a lot of range, so you've got
Speaker 1: to if you're putting together a network like this, you've
Speaker 1: got to get a lot of routers to cover all
Speaker 1: this territory. You've got to get a lot of wiring
Speaker 1: for your wireless routers to connect them to the to
Speaker 1: the you know, the actual internet, UH. And you have
Speaker 1: to have people running around making sure that you know,
Speaker 1: when they're blackouts and individual routers, somebody's gotta go fix
Speaker 1: it or repair the connection, or update the software and firmware.
Speaker 1: So you know, these once you have it up, it's
Speaker 1: not you know, one little node, you're covering an entire
Speaker 1: city block. You know that we're talking a lot of equipment.
Speaker 1: You don't just want the switch and and and have
Speaker 1: it all work out just fine. Um Anaheim's approach was
Speaker 1: to connect routers to things like UM city lights and
Speaker 1: traffic signal polls, which was kind of interesting, you know,
Speaker 1: using existing UH infrastructure to support this. UM still didn't work, unfortunately.
Speaker 1: UH So some people are saying, maybe this is a
Speaker 1: sign that we should just wait for a broader acceptance
Speaker 1: of the Wi max UH format of wireless connectivity. I
Speaker 1: guess we should probably talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: differences between WiFi and WiMAX. First of all, we'll just
Speaker 1: get down to the very nitty gritty WiFi UH as
Speaker 1: defined by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the
Speaker 1: I triple E or I yes, thank you very much,
Speaker 1: and my my cajun friends thank you too. That's designated
Speaker 1: as the eight O two dot eleven UH standard. There
Speaker 1: are a series of standards there, Yeah, there are variations.
Speaker 1: The original were eight O two dot eleven A and B,
Speaker 1: and there was a G which is faster and which
Speaker 1: is the latest, And it's really more of a proposal
Speaker 1: then firmly accepted standard, but it's got more, you know,
Speaker 1: each with each standard they're increasing the range and the
Speaker 1: reliability and the speed and the speed for the network.
Speaker 1: So you know, it's it's pretty robust to have a
Speaker 1: series of standards like that, right and there in case
Speaker 1: you're wondering why they skipped over certain letters, those letters
Speaker 1: also are are part of the standards, but they deal
Speaker 1: with very specific instances like like roving WiFi, like when
Speaker 1: you when you move from one WiFi system to another,
Speaker 1: how can you seamlessly make that transition so that the
Speaker 1: user is not effect not affected when he or she
Speaker 1: moves out of one network and into another. But the
Speaker 1: ones that Chris mentioned are the specific standards that relate
Speaker 1: to data transmission. UM Now, it's unlicensed, which means which
Speaker 1: in this case means that, uh, when you try and
Speaker 1: access a WiFi network, you're essentially battling it out with
Speaker 1: everyone else who's also trying to access that network, and
Speaker 1: this can affect your connection. It can make it go slower.
Speaker 1: I can mean that you could have an unreliable connection.
Speaker 1: You could get booted off if too many people are
Speaker 1: trying to get into that connection at the same time. UM. So,
Speaker 1: think of it like a big building that only has
Speaker 1: one doorway and everyone is trying to go in and
Speaker 1: out of that one doorway at the same time. Y Max,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, is like a big building with
Speaker 1: lots of doorways, and they only allow the number of
Speaker 1: people to access the building the same numbers as there
Speaker 1: are doors. So once you get to a point, like
Speaker 1: if they're forty doors in this building, that means forty
Speaker 1: people can access it going in and out of their
Speaker 1: individual doorways. But if the forty one person comes in
Speaker 1: they'll say, I'm sorry, you need to go to another building.
Speaker 1: Because the y max is a licensed UH standard as
Speaker 1: opposed to Wi Fi UM, and y MAX is also
Speaker 1: governed by the I E UH. It's at two dot sixteen,
Speaker 1: so it's uh. It can be a little confusing when
Speaker 1: you're talking about all these at two's right, that's true.
Speaker 1: That's true. Okay, So there are actually a couple of
Speaker 1: ways that you can transmit y MAX signals, line of
Speaker 1: sight and non line of sight UM. Non line of
Speaker 1: sight operates on the range of Wi Fi frequencies. Generally
Speaker 1: there's in a similar range two to eleven gigga hurts
Speaker 1: and you know, covers generally five square miles which is
Speaker 1: about sixty five square kilometers UM, which is you know,
Speaker 1: pretty healthy range, but not as much as the line
Speaker 1: of sight transmitters, and those actually require a dish antenna UM.
Speaker 1: I guess similar to what you might see for satellite television.
Speaker 1: You know, it's an antenna that would go on the
Speaker 1: side of your house, and it actually does need to
Speaker 1: connect uh, not physically, but it needs to be able
Speaker 1: to if you will see the transmitter, and it can
Speaker 1: cover areas of up to hundred square miles or square kilometers,
Speaker 1: which is, you know, quite a range. But the benefit
Speaker 1: of having the line of sight is it can use
Speaker 1: a higher frequency and in that higher frequency there's more
Speaker 1: room for for information you know, bandwidth, more bandwidth, and
Speaker 1: it gives you a more robust connection. UM, so you'd
Speaker 1: have fewer interruptions. We're talking a lot more bandwidth. UM.
Speaker 1: You know, you could say that it's an option that
Speaker 1: would really give some of the fiber optic connections to
Speaker 1: run for their money too. In fact, that's that's one
Speaker 1: of the main UH purposes for the y max technology.
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily to replace WiFi and and a lot
Speaker 1: of people kind of confused WiFi and y max, thinking
Speaker 1: that that y max is really the common phrases WiFi
Speaker 1: on steroids and that's not true, um, because they're they're
Speaker 1: very different standards. UM. But y max one of the
Speaker 1: purposes for it is to be that last mile It's
Speaker 1: that's what's called in the industry, in the in the
Speaker 1: s P industry, Internet service provider for you guys out there, UM,
Speaker 1: it's to provide the connection to from the last mile
Speaker 1: of the backbone UH to the customer. So that's why
Speaker 1: you would think of it as a replacement for for
Speaker 1: cable or for fiber optics, and uh, just to kind
Speaker 1: of compare it to Wi fi, WiFi in general reaches
Speaker 1: around a hundred and fifty feet indoors three feet in outdoors.
Speaker 1: That's not very far at all really in comparison. So
Speaker 1: one of the benefits of y max is that you
Speaker 1: don't need as many devices to cover a large area.
Speaker 1: You can use a few radio towers to transmit the
Speaker 1: signal and you'll be able to cover the same amount
Speaker 1: of area that you would. You would also required like
Speaker 1: like a hundred or two hundred devices for a WiFi
Speaker 1: version of that same network. UM. I should also point out,
Speaker 1: you know, you mentioned the distance of the the line
Speaker 1: of sight and the nonline of sight. Um some people
Speaker 1: can test that the non line of sight the ones
Speaker 1: where you don't need to have an antenna pointed at
Speaker 1: the transmitter. Some argue that in the field it gets
Speaker 1: down to maybe four to eight miles as opposed to
Speaker 1: but um, whether there or not, that's an instrumountable obstacle.
Speaker 1: It remains to be seen. And also, I mean that's
Speaker 1: just one side. It may be that they were using
Speaker 1: faulty technology just to test it. But either way, it
Speaker 1: still transmitting a signal much further than WiFi is capable
Speaker 1: of doing. So, Um, there's that now. The the other
Speaker 1: issue with y max is that there's no real infrastructure
Speaker 1: for y max uh, and that would cost a lot
Speaker 1: of money to build up that infra infrastructure, which is
Speaker 1: one reason why a lot of companies we're looking at
Speaker 1: WiFi instead, because in general WiFi is cheap. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then just run down to your corner electronics store and
Speaker 1: pick up a couple of routers that stoually cover it,
Speaker 1: right Yeah, yeah, well maybe a little more than that,
Speaker 1: but it's still like, it's still readily available and it's uh,
Speaker 1: and it's easier to to use something that you know,
Speaker 1: everyone's got a version of it out already. I mean
Speaker 1: there's so many like laptops. Now, if you buy a laptop,
Speaker 1: nine times of tenant's going to have a WiFi adapter
Speaker 1: already built into it. Um to to change over to
Speaker 1: y max would mean, because these are not using the
Speaker 1: same signals, it would mean you would have to build in.
Speaker 1: You would either have to have a lot of y
Speaker 1: max adapters available or you would have to build them
Speaker 1: in to the devices themselves. So you're talking about a
Speaker 1: massive change across multiple industries. So that's why it's not
Speaker 1: going to be a rapid adoption. I think, yeah, it
Speaker 1: actually has been. Uh, this is the first time you're
Speaker 1: hearing about why why Max. You might think that this
Speaker 1: is a brand new thing that's been, you know, coming
Speaker 1: up in the last few months. It has actually been
Speaker 1: going on for many years now, um, and it I
Speaker 1: would imagine that that expense and working out the different
Speaker 1: kinds of technology than line of site and online of
Speaker 1: site and how they're gonna administer that. Um. I think
Speaker 1: that has a lot to do with why it hasn't
Speaker 1: already shown up on everyone's doorstep. At this point, we
Speaker 1: all have things to think about, like say, what's the
Speaker 1: best site to buy a new leather jacket, whether to
Speaker 1: buy the three or six megapixel cameras. But thankfully we
Speaker 1: don't need to think about online fraud because for every
Speaker 1: purchase you make, Visa keeps an eye out for fraud
Speaker 1: with real time fraud monitoring and by making sure you're
Speaker 1: not liable for any unauthorized purchases. How's that for peace
Speaker 1: of mind? Safe, secure, decent. So I guess we'll we'll
Speaker 1: We'll just have to wait and see whether or not
Speaker 1: someone comes up with a viable way of providing WiFi
Speaker 1: through uh a citywide network. Um, or if they'll just
Speaker 1: scrap that idea, go to y max instead and hope
Speaker 1: that the new format works, or of some other format
Speaker 1: comes out that we're not even talking about right now,
Speaker 1: that that takes over both and just surprises the heck
Speaker 1: out of both of us. UM. We'll probably have to
Speaker 1: write an article on it. Yeah, I have. I have
Speaker 1: a good strong feeling that will be the case. But
Speaker 1: if you guys want to learn more about this, you
Speaker 1: can read how WiFi works or how y max works
Speaker 1: and how stuff works dot com right now, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk to you again soon. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 1: Send an email to podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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