How Do Wireless Internet Cards Work?

Video Transcript

"Wireless Internet card functionality, it's actually a lot like a modem, at least in terms of the basic concept. Whereas with a modem, you've got one modem, and you've got one modem on each end translating audio tones into binary, ones and zeros and sending them back and forth. With wireless cards, you've got the access point, or wireless router that's broadcasting a signal through radio waves at a certain frequency. The common frequencies are two point four gigahertz and five gigahertz. Once, you know, that broadcasts out, and then the wireless Internet card will receive those radio signals at that frequency, translate them back into the ones and zeros, which then your computer can interpret as, inter, you know, whatever content that you're trying to access. The standards for wireless inter, Internet cards are eight-oh-two-eleven-B, eight-oh-two-eleven-G, and eight-oh-two-eleven draft N. Basically the difference between the two is the amount of speed and to a certain extent, the effective range of the access points. Wireless B's interco, inter, eight-oh-two-eleven B's Internet connection's speed maxes out at eleven megabits per second, whereas wireless G maxes at fifty-four megabits per second. Draft N goes up to a hundred and forty megabits per second which is actually faster than a lot of wire, old wired Ethernet equipment. There are two more notes I want to go ahead and throw in here. The first one is that the reason it's called draft N is because the inter, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers has not made it official yet. They're still working on a couple little things that they want to tweak here and there. This means that while most draft, I mean there have been draft N products on the market for quite a while now, and most should work with each other without any problems, but there's still, there's a small chance that certain cards may not work with certain routers so you do need to keep that in mind when you're buying draft N."