Why Wi-Fi is Polite and Where It’s Going Next

Date: 12 May 2020 | posted in: MuniNetworks | 0 Facebooktwitterredditmail

In this episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast, we get an introduction to what this week’s guest calls “the most Southern of protocols” Wi-Fi. Here to guide us is Heather “Mo” Williams, Manager of Solutions Engineering at Ruckus Networks, Wi-Fi engineer for Black Hat conferences, and co-host on the podcast This Week in Enterprise Tech.

During her conversation with Christopher, Mo shares her background with Ruckus Networks and her family’s personal experience with poor connectivity in rural Texas. Then, Mo and Christopher discuss the history of Wi-Fi, the basics of how it functions, and what it means to operate over unlicensed spectrum. Mo explains how network congestion and the proliferation of Wi-Fi-enabled devices challenge engineers.

Christopher and Mo talk about the overblown hype around 5G technologies. They also dig into the Federal Communications Commission’s wireless policies, and Mo commends the agency for it’s recent decision to open up more spectrum for Wi-Fi, calling it a “game changer.”

This show is 51 minutes long and can be played on this page or via iTunes or the tool of your choice using this feed. You can listen to the interview on this page or visit the Community Broadband Bits page.

Read the transcript for this episode.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index.

Subscribe to the Building Local Power podcast, also from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, on iTunes or Stitcher to catch more great conversations about local communities, concentration of corporate power, and how everyday people are taking control.

Thanks to Arne Huseby for the music. The song is Warm Duck Shuffle and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.

Image of public Wi-Fi via PublicDomainPictures.net

This article was originally published on ILSR’s MuniNetworks.org. Read the original here.

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Katie Kienbaum

Katie is a Researcher with ILSR's Energy Democracy initiative, where she researches and writes about equitable and decentralized clean energy and its impact on communities across the country. Before joining the Energy Democracy initiative, she was a Research Associate with the Community Broadband Networks initiative