About Home WiFi Equipment

WiFi, which stands for Wireless Fidelity and to be truthful, is mostly just a marketing term, represents how this technology uses radio signals to transmit data in a computer network. 

A WiFi network is very convenient, cutting down on the costs of running Ethernet cable through walls in order to have a high-speed network in the home or in the office. However, if you’re new to this technology, you might not know what you need for WiFi in your home. 

It's really not complicated. Here’s what will get you enjoying the wireless revolution in your home:

A Wireless Router

The first thing needed for a WiFi network, in most cases, is a wireless router.  Many broadband companies now provide this piece of equipment when they set up your service.  What the wireless router does is transmit the information that comes from your provider to the other computers in your network.  It manages who gets what information and it is the device you configure to determine the SSID, which determines which computers can access your network. The SSID is a sequence of up to 32 letters or numbers that is the ID, or name, of a wireless local area network.

A Wireless Card

However, WiFi with just a transmitter isn’t very useful. Unless your computer or laptop has built-in wireless devices, you will need some sort of wireless card.  For PCs, this is usually a card that plugs into the PCI slot on your motherboard and has an antenna to aid in receiving data.  If you have a laptop, it’s probably built in, but can also be obtained by a wireless card that you plug into the PC Card slot.  Alternately, there are wireless receivers that run through a USB port as well.  With a wireless card to receive what your router sends, you have a basic WiFi network.

The Advantage Of Wifi

The big benefit of WiFi over wireless networks, of course, is that with just a little equipment, you can connect several computers to your home network without running any wires.  Even if you don’t have a wireless router at home, for example, as long as you have a wireless card and permission to use an SSID, whether at a coffee shop that offers WiFi access or at a friend’s house, you can have access to a computer network. 

Because WiFi equipment is inexpensive, with cards available for under $50 nowadays, it’s also a very affordable technology.  If your broadband company provides the router, the startup costs of such a network is very low, giving you access to fast Internet access for research or online gaming anywhere in your home. You can basically sit back in your easy chair with your laptop on your lap (no pun intended) and surf the web to your heart's desire. With such an advantage, it’s easy to see how having basic WiFi equipment can improve your home computing.