Introduction to 802.

11

From my laptop to my smartphone to my thermostat to the Alexa in my living room the

world of wireless is here and it's been here forever you'd get on airplanes and get
on wireless these days.

In this episode what we want to talk about is the standard that we use for wireless
called
802.11

The 802.11 is the standard when most people talk about I'm going to get on Wi-Fi or
you're fired up or you're looking for a network.

Well that's what we're talking about when we say 802.11.

Now the 802.11 standard has been around since the late 1990s and it's gone through
all kinds of changes and updates and all kinds of stuff.

However the core standard which is what we're going to cover in this episode
doesn't matter.

So if you're familiar with things like 802.11 B or 802.11N or 802.11AC will cover
that another episode.

Everything that I talk about in this works for every version of 802.11 So this is
kind of an overview to get us started into what 802.11 is.

802.11 uses radio waves to transmit network information between individual wireless
nodes.

Now what we're talking about know 802.11 pretty much everything starts off with
something called a wireless access point or a wap.

And I've got a few of it right here.

So here's a really old wireless access point.

What we have are some antennas that are sending and receiving radio data and it is
a bridging device that bridges into an ethernet network.

You'll see we've got an RJ 45 and this guy plugs into my ethernet network.

He gets an IP address just like anything else on my network.

But then he also speaks via radio waves to buy wireless clients.

Here's another example of a wireless access point.

Notice he's just got one RJ 45 connection.

All waps will normally I'm sure there's an exception somewhere have a single RJ 45
connection.

Now the thing you've got to be careful about here is that the world is filled with
devices that look like this.

I want to hold it upside down so it's a little bit better lit.

And what we have here is a typical home router a home router is.
We've got some switch ports in there.

We've got an internet connection.

So really what you're looking at here folks this is a wireless access point.

But it's also a switch and it's also a router.

This is a device that does all kinds of stuff all wrapped in one.

So you need to be careful when we talk about wireless access points.

There is a wap here but there's a lot of other stuff as well so don't go calling me
up and say Mike I have a web that has more than one RJ45.

Do you have a router that also has a wap built into it.

So the cornerstone of everything that makes 802.11 work is the concept of what's
called as a service set identifier or an SSID in the 802.11 world in order to make
the radio work you go into these devices one way or another and you set an SSID.

And this SSID is a word or a term or a phrase that this device will then normally
just broadcast out and then as a client I can try to log into that and anybody
who's ever looked at your laptop or your smartphone trying to get on a wireless
network what you're actually looking at there are SSIDs.

Now there's two ways to go about this.

The first way to go about it and by far the most common way is what we call
infrastructure mode 802.11 infrastructure mode just means I'm using a wireless
access point.

That's all it means.

So if you're using a wireless access point you're using infrastructure mode there
is another way to do it called ad hoc mode with ad hoc mode.

You can set up and most operating systems support this.

You can just fire up your windows laptop and instead of looking for a network you
can basically go I'm going to start an ad hoc network and I'm going to call it
Mike's temporary network enter and now other laptops other smartphones and what
else can connect to you.

So Ad-Hoc is a really common way if you need to do a quick ad hoc network and that
works great.

But most the time for the serious heavy lifting of to 802.11 we install a wireless
access point configure it with an SSID and off we go.

OK.

Now if you have a single wap with a single SSID you have what's known as a basic
service set identifier or a BSSID which is kind of cool because with a 802.11 it is
built from the ground up to support multiple weps that are working together.

So I could if I wanted to grab one of these waps and then grab two or three more
plug them into the same switch and as long as I give them each the same SSID name
the exact same name.

All I have to do is type in the name.

Hit enter.

And these devices will start working with each other automatically.

There's nothing I have to set up or configure.

They'll do cool things like for example if somebody is really close to this
wireless access point they'll connect to him.

But as they walk away and get closer to another they will automatically hand you
off.

There's not even anything to set up or configure.

It just works.

One of the beautiful reasons that we love 802.11 so much.

So when you have lots of wireless access points that are all working together and
all their RJ45 is are plugged into a common switch a common broadcast domain you
have created what we call an extended service set identifier or ESSID all 802.11
are designed to run with in the industrial scientific and medical band's the ESM
bands.

Now there's a number of bands but the two that we use for any version of 802.11 is
going to be the 2.4 gigahertz band and the 5 gigahertz band now.

When we say a band we're talking about a range of frequencies.

So kind of like change the channel on your television.

You've got a band of frequencies and we chop it up into preset what we call
channels and these channels are individual frequencies.

In order for my wireless access point to talk to my client I'm going to have to go
in and make sure that we're talking on the same channel.

Now in other episodes we'll go into a lot more detail on this.

But the 2.4 gigahertz band has a number of channels 1 through 11 we'll talk about
this more later.

And the five gigahertz band has a bazillion channels with numbers like 100 and 400
500.

They go way up there.

The nice part about all this is that for the most part our wireless client talks to
this and they negotiate a channel and they stick to it.

There's nothing for us to set.

There are some situations where that might come into play.

So we've been talking about the wireless access points.

I want to talk about the clients for a minute.

So let me put up a bunch of pictures to help you understand what type of devices
the hardware sits on the client side.

So let's start with this picture here.

This is an old school wireless network card.

It snaps into a slot on a desktop system and you can see it has antennas.

And this guy we can configure and that will allow that desktop system to act as a
client.

We can also see USB based wireless nics.

Here's an example of one that you just plug into a USB port and it allows that
particular device to become a wireless client.

Laptops pretty much have wireless built into them.

Here's a picture of a laptop and I've actually opened the bottom up and you could
really see the actual wireless NIC that's built into the laptop.

And if you look very carefully you can even see the antenna connections for that
particular little tiny wireless device.

But it doesn't stop there.

Take a look at say for example your common smartphone.

All smartphones are wireless clients so they have to have a wireless NIC built into
them.

They're usually just built so much into the actual smartphone itself.

You don't see it.

Same with tablets.

Even things like my cameras today my nest thermostat that I use in my house these
are all wireless clients.

They all have radios built into them with antennas that are designed to find these
wireless access points.

All right.

Now if I'm going to have these guys talking one of the challenges we run into is
how do we get radio signals from a client to a wireless access point back.

I mean anybody who's tuned in on an old AM radio can appreciate that you get all
kinds of interference and problems like that.

So what we do in the world 802.11 is we lean very heavily on something called

carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance.

Now don't confuse that with the old Ethernet carrier sense multiple access
collision detection with carrier sense multiple access collision avoidance what
happens is that if I have a wireless client he's not going to send anything until
he knows the coast is clear.

So with 802.11 they're always going to use CCMA.

There's never a collision with CSMA because they avoid each other and they have
what's called a back off time.

They'll wait a few extra milliseconds before they send data the actual transmission
of the data itself comes in one of two forms.

There's an old form called Digital sequence spread spectrum.

So DSSS is kind of the original way we used to do this.

And what would happen with this is that even within that channel there's even more
sub frequencies and we could spread a signal across these.

And in the hopes that if one gets stopped for interference that another one would
get through.

Today the primary way we do it is using something called OFDM orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing.

In this particular case we still are using a type of spread spectrum but it can be
in a much wider range.

The channels particularly in the five gigahertz band can be very very wide which
allows these guys to do a lot of variance in there.

The nice part about DSSS or OFDM is that you don't set this you just pick a
particular type of 802.11 say 802.11AC and that's already picked for you.

The exam is curious about this stuff and in other episodes I will break this down
in a per type of 802.11 so you'll know all the answers for it.

So that's the basics of 802.11

There's a lot more to do here but the important thing is that no matter what
version of 802.11 that you're running you will always have a whap if you're running
infrastructure mode.

You will always have a client you will always have at least SSID you're going to be
using one of two different bands and you're going to be using some type of
technology to get the data from the client to the web and back.

A WAP is a bridging device that connects into an Ethernet network and communicates
via radio waves to wireless clients

A WAP has an SSID (Service Set IDentifier), a word or phrase used to connect
wireless devices to the WAP device

CSMA/CA (carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance) is the method used
to prevent wireless collisions

802.11 Standards

The 802.11 standards been around now for well arguably a little bit over 20 years
and well I've been there since the beginning and I love talking about 802.11 now we
need to be careful.

I know I called this idiot to live in standards but really there's only one
standard 802.11 but it's a 20 year old standard.

So things have gotten faster better more colors and all that kind of stuff.

So what we do is we create extensions to the 802.11 standard and that's when you
hear things like 802.11B or 802.11N or 802.11AC.

They're just taking the 802.11 standard and doing stuff to it to make it better
faster smarter does more and more colors whatever.

OK.

So even though we say the word extensions the network plus we'll say standards.

So if someone says the 802.11 to you don't beat them up.

Just smile quietly to yourself and go.

It's really an extension but you probably took a CompTIA course anyway.

So let's get started.

I have in front of me a complete stack of wireless access points to pretty much

cover the history of 802.11 and I had to go down into the vaults to find a couple
of these guys.

Anyway what I'm going to do is use these as a way to describe the different 802.11
standards which are going to be seen on the network plus.

So let's start with the granddaddy of them all.

Good old 802.11B

Now the 802.11B is arguably the first standard 802.11B ran at a blistering 11
megabits per second.

It ran on the 2.4 gigahertz band.

And within that band so when they say 2.4 gigahertz band that's not one frequency
it's a range of frequencies that's why they call it a band.

And so within that band they knew that there'd be a lot of other SSIDs around.

So the idea was to break it up.

So the original 802.11 in the standard defines 14 different channels which are
pieces of that 2.4 gigahertz band.

Now depending on where you lived you would have more or less channels here in the
United States.

We got 11 channels.

Now there's a problem with these channels.

And oh by the way these channels are numbered very creatively 1 through who have
it.

The problem with the channels was that they overlapped and that's not good because
if you would set one wireless access point to channel one and another one to
channel two they'd interfere with each other and it wouldn't work.

But you'd have problems so when we talk about 2.4 gigahertz band devices 802.11B
being the best personal first example is we really only have 3 channels 1 6 or 7
and 11 and those are the only three channels you can have without overlapping and
we'll see as we get into later standards that we do stuff to get past that.

So this one is good old 802.11B.

The next standard I want to talk about or extension is arguably the other
alternative for the first 802.11 extension is 802.11A.

Now this is actually a pretty cool old wireless access point.

Cisco made out of steel anyway.

If you actually ever used one of these send me an email and just say Hey I remember
these Mike.

This is a good old Cisco Aeronet 1200 you still see him out there every now and
then.

This was a great robust business enterprise level wireless access point and it's
also in this particular case an 802.11A device.

Now 802.11A.

Even though it came out at about the same time 802.11B is very different.

First of all it runs on the five gigahertz range.

It also has channels but the whole channel thing changes a little bit with with
802.11A.

Trust me when I tell you we don't really worry about channels when we get into five
gigahertz range a total of eight ran at 54 megabits per second.

So it was a lot faster and it actually had arguably a slightly shorter range.

These two guys came out at the same time.

So when 802.11B came out it really used a more popular ISM band that 2.4 gigahertz
whereas the one that this guy was using at five gigahertz while it is also an ISM
band industrial scientific and medical that ISM wasn't nearly as often populated so
a lot of people would go to 802.11A.

Even though it tends to be a little bit more expensive not just because it was a
lot faster than 802.11B but also you had less chance of interference from all these
other types of different devices.

So this guy is good old 802.11A.

We didn't see a lot of it but boy did his legacy follow on with later versions.
Now the third type of 802.11 standard I want to talk about is the one that in my
opinion really put wireless on the map.

And if you don't recognize this guy well you will see what I have in front of me
here is probably the 57 Chevy of wireless access points in fact this really isn't a
wireless access point it's really a router if you look at the router.

This is the infamous lynxes wrt54G 802.11G.

Changed the game.

I mean there was plenty of wireless around back in the 802.11B 802.11A days but
802.11G really did something very clever.

First of all it runs on the 2.4 gigahertz band just like 802.11B which means it is
pretty much instantaneously backward compatible with 802.11B but it took the speed
functions from 802.11A to 802.11G runs at 54 megabits per second which when it came
out was smokin fast.

It was fantastic.

802.11G changed the game.

Now granted it's still on the 2.4 gigahertz band so it has the channel limitations
you can only have three channels and all that but the cool part was is that it was
completely backwardly compatible with 802.11B it came with a lot of high speed and
lynxes made a lot of money with this guy.

So that is good old 802.11G.

Now everybody is going to have versions of 802.11 that they like and others that
they dislike.

My personal dislike is the next guy right here.

This is 802.11N, 802.11N came out as a way to increase the speed beyond 54 megabits
per second and to start moving into the five megahertz range.

So when we talk about 802.11N First of all they're always going to have more than
two attenaes as this one has exposed and then sometimes you'll see them.

They don't have any antennas at all.

Trust me they have more than two antennaes and runs at both the 2.4 gigahertz and
the five gigahertz band.

That's number one.

Number two this guy can run as slow as 108 megabits per second but it can run a lot
faster.

Usually around 300 megabits per second.

The reason I'm being a little wishy washy on speed is because 802.11N.

Introduce the idea of what we call channels and literally you can keep plugging
more and more antennas into the sky and you can increase throughput up to a maximum
which I don't I'm going to say on camera because they're pretty high.
Nobody really got to them though.

The other really cool thing about 802.11N is that it introduced something called
Mimo, Mimo allowed you to use multiple channels to talk to different devices.

So if I had two devices and if I had enough literally enough send and receive
antennas I could almost make an own little personal conversation to one device at a
time unfortunately.

But it could make for a higher speed, 802.11N for all of its improvements really
brought some stuff into the game that made life challenging at least for me trying
to configure this stuff.

For example one of the things that 802.11N invented was a different kind of packet
that it would send out.

So in order for it to be backwardly compatible with different devices it would have

to go into these different types of legacy modes and it would be difficult to
configure access points to do it the right way.

In particular if you didn't have the right kind of network card See back then you
would upgrade to 802.11N type network and you thought you had 802.11N network cards
in your devices.

But all of a sudden you couldn't get real high speeds.

And the reason is is either the wap didn't have the right type of configuration.

They had a mode called Greenfield mode which means we're all in 802.11 and
everything's running great.

And it was a bit of a challenge you'd end up having to go back to your network
cards and your laptops or whatever it is and you'd have to do these firmware
updates or something to get those cards to know what was taking place.

So there was a lot of tweaking with to in and in my opinion even with its
improvements in speed and such.

It was a little bit of a challenge.

It's going to take the next version of 802.11 to get this right.

My favorite version of 802.11 is 802.11AC I've got an AC wireless access point

right here.

So this nice pretty guy which I literally just pulled out of my house I installed
this fairly recently.

Is 802.11AC, 802.11AC in my opinion took everything that was bad about 802.11N and
fixed it and made stuff faster all the same.

802.11AC runs in the five gigahertz band.

Now it can also run in the 2.4 gigahertz band but not for 802.11AC.

This wireless access point right here has three antennas for N and three antennas
for AC.

So it's really three antennas for the five gigahertz band and three antennas for
the 2.4 gigahertz band so I shouldn't even say N this guy could even do a 802.11B.

Why anyone would do that.

But you could so it has the ability of backward compatibility but simply by making
a better access point.

Not because 802.11AC itself does it.

So be sure you're comfortable with that difference.

This guy runs at incredibly high speeds for the network.

Plus we're just going to say that it runs around one gigabit per second but it's
actually a lot more flexible than that.

With 802.11AC you have channels and the more channels you add the more speed you
get.

In fact it's really limited by how good the network cards are in your client so it
can go up higher and higher speeds.

But again for network plus just think about one gigabit per second.

So 802.11AC has a lot of power to it and it's really something that I love and I
use it all
the time.

The last thing I want to mention with 802.11AC is that it builds on the 802.11N and
Mimo concept and now has something called MU-Mimo multiuser memo.

So basically its Mimo just like we saw in 802.11N but it's multi user so as many
channels as you add you can provide mimo to multiple users at one time.

And it really increases throughput dramatically.

I love 802.11AC

so these are the 802.11 extensions or standards or whatever you want to use on the
network.

Plus keep in mind that the questions are going to be seen about standards aren't
going to be too many questions like what speed did 802.11B run at.

I mean they may throw that at you but what they're going to do instead is they're
going to create scenario type questions where it's like their wireless network is
running too slow.

What version would you recommend them to come up to.

Or they're having problems with channels what do you think they could do about
that.

So a lot of stuff is going to be moving from 2.4 to 5 or moving from an earlier

version to a later version.

Just take some common sense you'll knock those questions out.

No problem.
Early wireless standards were 802.1B (2.4-GHz)

First widely-used standard was 802.11G (2.4GHz)

Current fastest standards are 802.11N and 802.11AC