Whatshot
'Opinion v Experience'
'Opinion v Experience'
Imagine for a moment if all the wireless connections in the world were instantly replaced by cables. You'd have cables stretching through the air from every radio in every home hundreds of kilometres back to the transmitters. You'd have wires reaching from every cellphone to every phone mast. You couldn't step out of the door without tripping over cables.
Wireless started out as a way of sending audio programs through the air. Pretty soon we started calling it radio and, when pictures were added to the signal, TV was born. The word "wireless" had become pretty old-fashioned by the mid-20th century, but over the last few years it's made a comeback. Now it's hip to be wireless once again thanks to the internet.
There is a common confusion with Radio vs Wi-Fi, Radio is carrier grade wireless which cannot communicate to just any device and requires the same brand of receiver tuned to the same frequency of the sender. Wi-Fi is a protocol of Radio but, is a very diluted and accessible to most devices (laptops, cellphones, tablets and gaming devices to mention a few). Due to Wi-Fi following such a strict Protocol and fixed on specific channels it makes it heavily susceptible to interference and malicious hacking.
Outdoor Wi-Fi has been used for many years and grown to be unreliable, as the Wi-Fi airspace gets more and more cluttered and less channels become available companies start pushing the power up on their devices and it becomes a case of he who shouts louder gets by.
With that said high speed, high frequency radios have been redesigned without the Wi-Fi Protocol but, rather their own unique form of communicating between them (patent by those companies).
After all said and done any form of Radio is an invisible game of throw-and-catch. Instead of throwing a ball from one person to another, you send information, coded as a pattern of electricity and magnetism, from a transmitter (the thrower) to a receiver (the catcher) both of which are kinds of antennas. If you are really bad at throwing or catching, you will drop the ball!