What is Wireless?
Wireless, an old name for “radio,” is the hot new buzzword used to describe a host of products and standards that allow communications without the need for additional electrical connections. Typically, the term wireless implies that information is being carried from one place to another by electromagnetic waves traveling through the air. These waves exhibit different properties depending upon their frequency. For example, microwaves, on the order of GHz, tend to bounce off walls and objects. At the opposite extreme are low frequency waves, on the order of tens of MHz, which tend to travel through walls and objects. It is up to the wireless systems designer to select an operating frequency that is suitable for a particular application, thereby taking advantage of some of these properties.
