WiFi

Remember when you needed to save a document, spreadsheet, or piece of software to a portable disk or thumb drive if you wanted someone else to be able to view/install it on their computer? The other user had to literally plug in the storage drive and load the document or program onto their computer to gain access. Even in businesses, there was no connectivity between the equipment from one desk or office to the next.

The advent of Wireless Fidelity, or WiFi, changed all of that by allowing devices to automatically share information through a network. The original design created private or local networks inside of homes and businesses and eventually grew to encompass a much wider area, allowing access to a multitude of users in places such as airports and hotels. Recently, some localities have experimented with WiFi networks that span entire cities.

As the demand for sharing and accessing information grows, however, WiFi networks are beginning to feel the squeeze in terms of the total amount of data they can carry and user activity that can occur at any one time. Today, that capacity stands at the 4G level, but there’s a crisis looming on the horizon as WiFi service providers contend with the issue of how to meet the massive needs of tomorrow.

Full duplex functionality addresses that problem by literally cutting the amount the bandwidth needs in half. With the ability to simultaneously send and receive transmissions at the same frequency, full duplex essentially doubles the data capacity of existing WiFi networks.