Chapter 1. How Wireless LANs Work

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

That, in a nutshell, is how a wireless computer network works. In a wired network, data is sent and received between computers and routers using pieces of cable called Ethernet.

In a wireless network, air replaces the cables, and the same computer-to-computer communications are transmitted and received over the air using radio waves, very similar actually to how your mobile phone communicates.