Do you understand wireless internet?

If you had to explain wireless technology to someone who’d never heard of it, how would you do it?

Or better yet, how would you explain accessing wireless internet via your smartphone to someone who’s never heard of the internet at all?

Popular ideas include explaining it like access to an infinite library and/or a public forum in your pocket but even then explaining the actual technology would be a huge uphill struggle even though the concept might hit home with them.

With this in mind, would that be a problem? Do we need to understand exactly how the technology we use works? Do most people even understand how wireless internet works if they use it every day? Or do they simply count on their wireless internet provider to deliver it to them and save some mind-share for memes and photos of cats?

In many cases it’s not actually that important for every person using technology to know exactly how it works and we see this at every level of technology we deal with on a daily basis.

Even though many of us drive cars we’re not all aware of every part of the car, how it works and how to fix it if it’s broken. The same goes for our phones and laptops, our showers and boilers; the list goes on.

This is why we’ve got specialists who fix and maintain them for us and it’s also why most promotions you see about modern products and services, whether that’s wireless internet or a car, don’t focus on the technical specifications of said product or service.

Wireless internet providers might tell you about what you can use it for (“Stream 4K video in the comfort of your home.”) or tell you what problem it fixes (“Your business no longer has to deal with laggy video conferencing with our wireless internet offering!”) but rarely do they go into the finer detail of the technology. Unless, of course, they’re aiming to sell exclusively to IT professionals.

Even though we can then agree that not everyone needs to understand the ins and outs of any given technology to utilise it in their lives we do tend to learn about many historical technological advances throughout our education. We learn about Henry Ford and the car, Graham Bell and the phone as well as so many other innovators so how will future educators deal with wireless internet? Will we see entire chapters dedicated to the most innovative wireless internet providers? Will it be skimmed over or will there be a deep dive?

A sneak peek into what it could look like can be found in a great article by Explain That Stuff from last year where they trace the history of wireless technology, both in terms of wireless internet as well as other tech like radio and TV, offering easily digestible insight in layman’s terms.

So if this is of interest, click here to read more and check out some of Luminet’s wireless offerings to see how we’re looking to innovate the way your business uses its connectivity solutions.