Household Wi-Fi: how far we have come

Wireless internet technology is so commonplace these days that we tend to forget that it has only really been around for less than a decade. Moreover, it is only in the last five years or so that wireless networking has become widely available in the home as well as from numerous coffee shops, internet cafes and other businesses where it is possible to get online using your laptop or smartphone. Given how remarkably sudden this transformation has been, there is simply no telling what the future holds for household wi-fi.



The first home internet connections were via the humble dial-up modem. Early modems slotted into an expansion port on the computer or were available as external units and could access the internet at speeds of 9.6 kb/s to 14.4 kb/s. These were soon replaced by devices that could achieve connections of 28.8, 33.6 and finally 56 kb/s, still a very small fraction of the speeds today’s broadband connections allow. These modems usually plugged into a single machine, making it difficult to share with other computers without specialised hardware. Even for those with advanced networking equipment, the slow connection speeds made internet sharing largely unfeasible.

This situation began to change in the early years of the new millennium when broadband internet connections became more affordable and started to appear in homes on a much wider scale. Many early broadband pioneers initially received USB ADSL or cable modems that allowed them to connect a single computer to the internet but soon found that they could share their connections with multiple machines using modem routers which allowed for an “always on” broadband connection. It wasn’t long before internet service providers began supplying wired modem routers as standard.



By around 2005, wireless networking had left its infancy and early adaptors were already setting their homes up with wifi networks allowing them to access the internet from anywhere in the house without having to install messy cabling. It wasn’t long before wireless networking saw an explosion in popularity and by around 2007, many ISPs were advertising “wireless broadband” as their most attractive packages and supplying wireless modem routers to new customers as standard.



In the last few years, wireless technology in the home has changed our lives in ways we couldn’t possibly have imagined only a decade ago. Today we can go online from wherever we are in the home using devices as varied as laptops, tablet computers and iPods. It’s possible to wirelessly stream music to our stereos and wirelessly download books to our e-readers not to mention sending documents to be printed on our wifi printers. It may not be too long now before the dream of the truly wireless home of the future, with everything from telephones to fridge-freezers communicating with each other, becomes a reality.



Isla Campbell writes for a digital marketing agency. This article has been commissioned by a client of said agency. This article is not designed to promote, but should be considered professional content.