About Wireless

Personal wireless communication services have been available to the general public for only about 10 years, since the breakthrough of cellular phones. Strictly speaking, walkie-talkies and other simple devices have been used much longer, but they have not addressed the challenge of being connected wirelessly everywhere, any time, and with any type of information. Personal wireless communication has traditionally meant wireless speech service, but this is now changing rapidly. 

The Internet as a source of content and as a medium for offering and delivering services is the driving force behind the increasing use of data communications among mass users. This phenomenon will be further fostered, as the multimedia content in numerous applications, services, and professions, such as electronic commerce, management, maintenance, education, and entertainment will become a common embedded feature in information systems and products. As a result of this development, the term multimedia as a separately addressed service category disappears. 

Compared to speech and traditional data transmission, multimedia has more stringent requirements.
 
A combination of several media components tends to increase the bandwidth requirement and the burstiness of transmissions. Typically, low error rates are also required and conversational multimedia services call for short delays in order to fulfil real-time requirements. Furthermore, different media components are synchronised in time. Multimedia is already merged in the Internet, as video and audio coding technologies have proceeded towards lower bit rates and robustness. At the same time, the capacity and support for Quality of Service (QoS) has increased in wired networks. The next logical step is to merge the Internet as a source of multimedia content and the wireless networking seamlessly.

From Trends in personal wireless data communications ( Marko Hännikäinen,Timo D Hämäläinen,Markku Niemi and Jukka Saarinena ) Computer Communications, Volume 25, Issue 1, 1 January 2002, Pages 84-99.

• WiFi Coverage Maps (Campus view)