Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1066130
8 I ICT TODAY BRIEF HISTORY How did wireless get here? Some may see the works of great scientists like Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, Tesla, and even Ben Franklin as the beginning of wireless communications. Or perhaps it began with Guglielmo Marconi, influenced by all these other greats, who first demonstrated a wireless telegraph system for the British government in July 1896 and later transmitted Morse code across the Atlantic in 1901. But it was Reginald Aubrey Fessenden who realized that the spark-generated transmission systems, used by Marconi and others for receiving wireless telegraphy signals, were not suitable for voice transmission. Inspired by watching the ripples in a pond caused by dropping a pebble in the water, he developed a continuous-wave (CW) carrier method, a fundamental of radio wave physics still in use today. He broadcast his first music and voice program on Christmas Eve in 1906 from Brant Rock, Massachusetts. This event is considered by most historians as the birth of radio broadcast and the real starting point to communicating today with just about anything that has an on/ off switch. Wireless connectivity has become as inescapable as electricity had become about 100 years ago. Sending sound (i.e., voice and audio) over the airwaves was just the beginning, followed by the first television broadcast in 1928; invented by Philo Farnsworth who added video and pictures to wireless. Subsequently, the first digital transmissions over wireless were likely around the time of the first modem in 1958. Because telephone trunks were already being transmitted through microwave systems, modem connections transmitting data at 300 bits per second would have technically been the first wireless data connections. Some may argue that earlier acoustical couplers were transmitting data, implying that the earliest microwave systems built in the late 40s could have been carrying data. However, wireless networking that is more closely related to today did not start to take shape until near the end of the 20 th century. This is when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) first began working on the 802.11 family of standards, which set the stage for wireless technology defining the new millennium. Although the methods of carrying data over telephone trunks through short and long-haul microwave has gone away, microwave and millimeter wave technologies are more advanced and more common than ever. WIRELESS TODAY Information has been transmitted through the air for well over a century, but it has only been since the dawn of the 21 st century that wireless technology has become such a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Very few people can get through a day without receiving some type of information that got to them by traveling invisibly over the airwaves. It is almost all digital today, but it is still an analog radio wave or light wave that is carrying images, video, voice, news, apps, and anything else one can think of to hold in the palm of a hand. This evolution has been fueled largely by consumer demand, but it has depended on the continuing development of international standards to create interoperability and compatibility. The IEEE has been involved with electrical and communications advancement since before Marconi transmitted his telegraph over the Atlantic. It is natural that it has continued to be instrumental in the development of so many technologies used today. Although there had been many wireless technologies developed earlier, the first real international standards for wireless networking came through the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Group with its first efforts published in 1997. The standards were based largely on technologies and methodologies that had already been widely deployed, such as direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS), frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) and orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). It was the first endeavor to create true compatibility for and across all manufacturers. This was the beginning of today's wireless world. The next big step in wireless LANs is 802.11ax.