Truly Wireless?

Having been born in the 1990’s, I grew up using the computer and the internet. I remember first using AOL and having slow dial-up internet. This usually took a few minutes to get internet access. Now there is wireless internet which is streamed through an antenna and recognized by the computer. It takes mere seconds to connect to the internet with wireless. Major cities like Philadelphia and college campuses have wireless internet with a strong signal so people can connect anywhere. Today anything and everything can be found on the World Wide Web. Websites like Google and Bing make it easy to navigate the internet and are helpful in finding information you are searching for. The required reading for this week discussed how connected we are today to the internet. It also went into detail about how information travels across many networks until it reaches its destination.

                The first additional article I looked at was, Introducing a Thermostat Steve JobsWould Love: Nest. Professor Mitchell mentioned this thermostat a few times in class and I wanted to know a little bit more about it. I thought this article also went well with the idea of wireless internet. The Nest is a thermostat that ideally after a week or so you won’t have to touch at all. The first week of its life the device takes in a lot of data about how you like your home cooled and heated. After this period, the device recommends settings that are more efficient. Nest continues to learn throughout its life span via five sensors. These five sensors include temperature, humidity, light and two activity sensors. The activity sensors are used to identify when no one is in the home and adjust the temperature accordingly. One problem with normal thermostats is that people set them either way above or way below the desired temperature, thinking that it will cool or heat their home faster. The Nest has a feature called “time to temperature” that lets the user know exactly how long it will take to cool or heat their home to their desired temperature to avoid this waste in energy. To tie in with the idea of being wireless, you can remotely adjust Nest from anywhere in your home. To do so you just need to log onto the Nest website or download the app to your mobile phone. The Nest website also tracks a number of things such as the times you’ve adjusted the thermostat and even how much money you are saving.

                The second article I looked at was, Wireless Internet for All without the Towers. Since we live in a large city we assume, at least I did, that everyone has wireless internet connection. However, this is not the case for the rest of the world. At least 27% of the United States’ population do not have internet connection and another 30% with internet connection do not have a wireless connection and are still using slow dial-up. In an effort to solve this problem, municipal Wi-Fi networks are being installed. There are a few drawbacks with this though. For one, installing municipal Wi-Fi is costly and can run up to $125,000 a square mile to install. The Wi-Fi is being installed on street lamps and has a strong signal if you are sitting outside at the corner café but is barely recognizable inside homes. Wi-Fi signals use unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum and must use low-power transmitters. This means that the Wi-Fi signals aren’t strong enough to penetrate through walls, which is why the majority of people in the United States use a router from inside their home to transmit the wireless signal. A small company, Meraki Networks, may have come up with a solution to this problem. They are calling it a Meraki box. The boxes run around $50 and can be easily installed by anyone that “knows how to plug in a toaster”. The box is located inside a home and sends a signal out to surrounding neighbors. Some neighbors will have a similar box called a repeater that will relay the signal even farther. Each box comes with special software that meshes all of the boxes networks together. This means that if one box becomes dysfunctional or is unplugged, the network will be re-routed. Meraki Networks was started by two M.I.T. students who have gotten the attention of Google. Their product will hopefully go into production and help solve the wireless internet connection in the United States and around the globe.