Most of the people nowadays uses computer either at home or at work. Once you have a laptop with built-in Wi-Fi on it you can now connect to the world. Over the past few years the technology has continued to improve the speed of WiFi. WiFi’s latest version is many times faster than DSL or cable connections from the local exchange, and literally hundreds of times faster than dial-up. Laptops or other mobile device users are able to continue to connect to the network whilst roaming from one part of the building to another without needing to be wired to a data outlet. Desk top PCs and printers can be equipped with wireless cards or external wireless interfaces to convert their Ethernet port to wireless. Now another breakthrough on WI-Fi technology has come to emerge. The Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group, said it is nearly finished putting together a Wi-Fi Direct specification, a set of technical “rules” that guide consumer electronics companies that plan to add the new capability.
Kelly Davis-Felner, the Wi-Fi Alliance’s marketing director, said Wi-Fi Direct will make it easier to liberate the mounting gigabytes of digital family photos that are trapped in cameras, smart phones or PCs. Now those gadgets will be able to connect directly to digital photo frames, TVs or printers.
In creating the specification, the Alliance is moving into the territory of Bluetooth, a competing wireless technology that already handles direct gadget-to-gadget connections. Bluetooth uses less power but has much shorter range and a lower transfer speed. To tackle the latter problem, the industry group behind Bluetooth announced last year that it would co-opt Wi-Fi technology to make it possible to send videos and other bandwidth-hogging files around the house, much as Wi-Fi Direct promises to do.
Only one of the gadgets need have the new Wi-Fi Direct technology to make a two-way connection work. In one scenario, you could connect a smart phone with Wi-Fi Direct to a laptop and piggyback on its wired Internet connection for a quick e-mail check without tapping your phone’s data plan.
