Statistics show that 3.74 billion people in the world were using the Internet in March 2017. These numbers continue to grow and Wi-Fi use is stronger than ever. Here are some fun facts you might not have known about Wi-Fi.
Contrary to popular belief, Wi-Fi doesn’t stand for Wireless Fidelity. In fact, Wi-Fi isn’t short for anything.
Before Wi-Fi was chosen as the name for this type of connection, it was called WaveLAN, FlankSpeed, DragonFly, WECA, and IEE 802.11b Direct Sequence.
The first connection similar to Wi-Fi was achieved in 1971 when engineers at the University of Hawaii managed to connect computers over radio communications and introduced random access protocols with their ALOHAnet.
There’s often a limit of how many devices can be connected to a wireless network at a time and surfing and streaming speeds can suffer from an increased number of users. A 300 Mbps Wi-Fi router with 100 devices connected can provide 3 Mbps to each of them on average (300/100=3).
89% of households in the U.S. with broadband service have Wi-Fi installed and have 15 devices connected on average.
Wi-Fi connections are here to stay which is why Global Wasp is going to revolutionize how we connect to the Internet with users being able to sell surplus traffic to people in need of some extra traffic all using the Wi-Fi modules that we already have in our mobile devices.
Sources: Hosting Facts, Wi-Fi Planet, The Economist, StateTech, Lifewire, NCTA