Wireless LAN technology has been the surprise success story of the past few years.Trumping Bluetooth and outstripping 3G, it seems that this flavour of wireless technology is here to stay... I Like the Internet and SMS before it, the success of wireless local area networks (W-LANs)―or 'WiFi', as the technology is also known―has taken the telecomms industry by surprise. Unlike the huge marketing campaigns surrounding mobile phones, W-LANs became popular by stealth, used initially by the IT community and then rapidly adopted by the business sector as a way of providing more flexible broadband Internet connection. It is therefore little wonder that W-LAN is being promoted as a viable alternative to 3G by some. The simple way that WiFi works has added to its appeal. W-LANs function in the same way as a fixed-wire local area networks in that they allow users to hook up with a network and download files and access the Internet. However, W-LANs use radio frequency (RF) technology operating in the unregulated 2.4GHz frequency band―and increasingly in the 5GHz frequency band.
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