What’s your evidence, Richard Easton??!?
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Our mother who art in WiFi
Thy beacon come
Thou handshake be done
In ac as in 802.11Give us this day our daily bandwidth,
And forgive us our connectivity issues,
As we forgive those who disrupt our signal.ACK
Let me tempt you with some SYN
No thanks, I’m FIN.
SYN-ACK
RST
802.11ac
pfft gtfo of here we’re gearing up for a war.
LAN SENSING WALL PENETRATING XRAYS BABY! GOOOO 802.11bf
coming soon to an ISP near you
Great to recognise this invention.
I was surprised by the choice of ‘Mother of Wi-Fi’ though - Wi-Fi hasn’t used ‘frequency hopping’ as such since 802.11b was released back in 1999 - so very few people will have ever used frequency-hopping Wi-Fi.
GPS only uses it in some extreme cases I think, but I’m not an expert.
However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.
Before 802.11b though?
Uh I don’t think there was Wifi before that
However, Bluetooth absolutely does depend on it to function in most situations, so ‘Mother of Bluetooth’ might have been more appropriate.
Considering the namesake of Bluetooth, the “Mother of Bluetooth” sounds like the kind of person who would have a tea party with “Grendel’s Mother” from Beowulf.
So her invention isn’t used for Wifi now, but was used in the initial design of it? You might even say she helped give birth to it…
I guess my point is that it isn’t a particularly important part of the design of Wi-Fi - it would likely have been born regardless of the invention; Bluetooth would not.
Yeah but her work built on someone else’s so we’re taking it all away from her and calling them parents of her work so she gets nothing…
Doesn’t feel as fun anymore, does it?
Let the guys dad have some credit for his work, give her credit for her work - I don’t get what’s so controversial.
Okay, well, I’m a network professional with a specialty in wireless and a keen interest in historical wireless networking, and “non-standard” stuff is also quite interesting. I’m no Richard Easton.
I want to start with a disclaimer, by no means would I, nor should I be interpreted to be saying or implying that any contribution, regardless of source, isn’t valuable. Whether it comes from a woman, or man, white, black, or any color in-between, non-binary, gay, bi, trans, whatever. The contributor is valuable and their contribution is always valued.
That being said, FHSS, has its uses, and it’s been used in wireless. It’s a valid technology that should be recognised as such. As with many things, it wasn’t a singular effort, and nobody should imply otherwise.
As others have pointed out, the most commonly known technology which employs FHSS is Bluetooth; and trust me, trying to track down issues caused by BT interference is a nightmare because of it. Generally I avoid the problem by not using the 2.4ghz ISM band as much as possible, but I digress.
For those saying it’s not part of 802.11, it actually is. It’s an old part of the protocol which has long since been replaced and it is considered obsolete by the IEEE 802.11 group.
However, in the 802.11 protocol, sometimes called 802.11 prime (Wikipedia calls it “legacy”), it states: “[802.11] specified two raw data rates of 1 and 2 megabits per second (Mbit/s) to be transmitted via infrared (IR) signals or by either frequency hopping or direct-sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) in the Industrial Scientific Medical frequency band at 2.4 GHz.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11_(legacy_mode)
All I want to really add, is that networking is a team sport. If companies and people didn’t work together to make it function, then it wouldn’t work.
Only by collaborating and working together towards improvement and an increase in the ability of the technology to work across all platforms, vendors, manufacturers, and devices, can we get it to function at all. This fact is as true now as it was when FHSS was invented. Everyone needs to work together in order to make any real progress. Otherwise, all of our wifi stuff would “speak” different languages, and nothing outside of a single companies product line, would work with anything else.
Everyone’s contributions have helped wifi get to it’s current state, and that should never be forgotten.
I also work with Wi-Fi and am a CWNE, this post is spot on, thank you for writing this with such accuracy and clarity.
I’ve been thinking of going for my cwna/cwne. I just haven’t taken the time to figure out how to go about it.
Any pointers? Obviously I have a pretty solid foundation of knowledge, it’s just the whole getting it written thing that I’m most unsure of.
Though, having a good resource for studying just to review, would be nice as well.
For CWNA, the study guide and practice tests are all that I would recommend to pass the exam. The guides contain really good information although I’m sure you’ll know a lot of it already. For the CWNP, CWSP and CWAP, I’d recommend the study guide and practice tests again, but with some online research for any topics you’re struggling with. The CWAP exam is quite tough so you’ll need to get hands on with packet captures. But in general I found most exams to be fair and related to the real world, no vendor specific nonsense or horrible trick questions.
Once those are done the CWNE requires three short essays (less than 1000 words). And some other form of input, such as a white paper or blog, the CWNP website has this detailed but don’t worry too much about that now.
For the CWNA, I’d start with the study guide and see how you take to it. I found it really useful throughout my career. Feel free to reach out in the future if you have any questions.
Wifi doesn’t use frequency hopping. That’s bluetooth.
https://www.ieee802.org/11/Documents/DocumentArchives/1996_docs/1196049D_scan.pdf
Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum PHY of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Standard
It may be dropped, but it was used in the beginning
Wouldn’t that not still make her the mother of Wifi?
Hehehe, you can call her the mother of early 802.11 (and Bluetooth).
that’s not how it works. edit: others pointed it out already it seems. you would still call the inventor of a first car the father lf cars even though it has nothing to do with modern cars
edit2: but considering that she didn’t really invent wifi, just frequency hopping, I would maybe call her grandmother or something
She didn’t invent frequency hopping, Nicola Tesla did. She invented a system that used a piano roll (from a player piano) to alternate frequencies. Also she shared the patent with another person.
Yeah, I think I get it. I mean the analogy is a bit flawed. What she invented is that alike synchronizing the rolls of player pianos, you could build a mechanism that hops frequencies (instead of piano keys) to make remote controlling torpedos resilient against jamming.
Idk. To me it feels like calling the inventor of three-wheeled vehicles the father/mother of cars, if we want to stay with that analogy. It’s remotely related, not an integral part and nowadays solved differently. But the first car was a tricycle. (Benz Patent-Motorwagen)
But I don’t want to invalidate her achievements either…
Just chiming in as a network tech that deals with these terms regularly.
802.11, sometimes called 802.11 prime, to differentiate the first protocol from the 802.11 (WiFi) group. This protocol was not really every in widespread use. A few early niche cases, but it was quickly supplanted by 802.11a and 802.11b.
The b standard was one of the first major WiFi versions to see adoption, which used DSSS, or direct sequence spread spectrum. Which fell by the wayside because OFDM was faster and more efficient, which led wifi speed increases from 802.11g, through wifi 4 (802.11n), WiFi 5 (802.11ac), and WiFi 6 (802.11ax). The more recent versions use QAM (wireless N+), which augments OFDM with amplitude modulation.
Beyond QAM, speed improvements at this point are minimal and usually require wider channel widths to get any significant improvement, so 802.11 has focused on multiple access improvements and since 802.11ac, have been making improvements to MIMO. They started with SU-MIMO, then one-way MU-MIMO, then two way MU-MIMO.
I haven’t read up on the changes in WiFi 7 yet beyond 6Ghz being added. I’ll look into it after it’s been fully ratified.
Long story short, they moved to 5Ghz and eventually 6Ghz, because there isn’t enough channel width in 2.4 for WiFi 5, and 5ghz was getting a bit difficult to sustain for the speed they’re trying to hit, so 6Ghz is the next logical step.
But that’s not part of 802.11n or 802.11g or “a” or what we call “Wifi”… 802.11 in itself is a pretty long standard, including all kinds of different things.
I am not literally a part of my kids, but they wouldn’t be here without me.
but still, without frequency hopping no 802.11, without 802.11 no wifi
It’s a brief five-minute Google search for me, but it seems that everyone has problems with both reading comprehension and/or causality evaluation.
I think it’s great that such a patent exists and that the technology was invented by her. Yet, even checking the frequency-hopping spread spectrum page on Wikipedia shows that it was only one invention in the long series of discoveries and technologies, which was neither the first, nor the most crucial of them, and this particular option seems to be one of the sources of inspiration for later technologies (along with a bunch of predecessors).
The rest of the criticisms regarding the choice of Wi-Fi over Bluetooth is already mentioned in the comments of others.
I really don’t want to minimise the contribution of an individual towards the development of sophisticated technologies, and I have zero qualms about this individual being a woman, I just think that the presentation oversells the achievement which might cause additional mockery from those who do think that women (and actresses at that!) have no business in anything serious.
What I actually find impressive, however, is that a woman, at the time where women’s rights were far from what they are today (just read about her first marriage, that must have been hard), could be both an actress, an inventor, a producer, all while leading quite a bitter life it seems. Not many can boast that.
I guess where I’m going with that is that she, as many others, may be best praised as an example of a complex person that had many achievements as well as many hardships. Using her as a basis of “Didn’t think an actress could do something worthwhile? Gotcha!” statement seems a bit shallow.
edit: However, since this post showed me that a person like Hedy Lamarr has existed in the first place (yeah, I’m not well-versed in mid-20 century American culture, sorry), and interested me (and likely a bunch of others) enough to Google her biography, I’d say it’s a net positive regardless.
Don’t try and oversell “famous woman does tech thing”. Try and and make people aware of the women who actually did really cool tech things. Marie Curie was a bad ass
I can 100% agree with that. Sadly She often gets forgotten.
“Mother of Wifi” is a stretch. But “mother of Alka-Seltzer”? Definitely. “Midwife of the traffic signal”? Sure.
Fire up the ROFL-copter, we got a live one.
She took on where Heinrich Hertz left off, and made it to the top of the Tinseltown heap!
C’mon… you know you wanna see a musical on the life of Heinrich Hertz.Considering the man spent over a year working in a blacked-out room, trying to detect the faint spark of electricity transmitted wirelessly, it’s gonna have a song or three about fumbling or stumbling in the dark.
Considering the man spent over a year working in a blacked-out room, trying to detect the faint spark of electricity transmitted wirelessly, it’s gonna have a song or three about fumbling or stumbling in the dark.
Bruce Springsteen has you covered with “Dancing in the Dark”.
Wait til he finds out that the first computer programs were written by some poet with daddy issues
Calling Hedy Lamarr “the Mother of Wifi” because she invented FHSS is like calling E. A. Johnson, who invented the first capacitive touchscreen in 1965, “the Father of the iPhone”.
Father of Chat GPT, Issac Newton.
i’m pretty comfortable with calling him that. capacitive touchscreens are a big deal sounds like he deserves the praise.
Shout out also to John Underkoffler who was the technical advisor on Minority Report (and later Iron Man). The gesture controls in that movie heavily inspired the first smartphones.
this is crazy cool info, do you have further reading?
He did a TED talk in 2010 and there are several articles about him. Not much news in recent years, I guess he wasn’t very succesful in turning his motion control concept into a viable product. I interviewed him about eight years ago.
Capacitive touchscreens are a big deal but it kind of minimizes the work of the other technology that goes into a smartphone, like wireless internet, low power mobile CPUs capable of 3D graphics, lithium-ion battery packs, etc., to say nothing of the design engineers that worked on the exterior, the hardware, and the operating system and deserve credit for the iPhone way more than he does. Crediting the holder of a patent from over 40 years before the iPhone hit the market with the creation of the iPhone is stretching the truth at best.
children generally are able to have multiple parents.
if i give credit to Alice for being Bobby’s mother, i’m not minimizing the parenthood of any of Bobby’s other parents. just giving credit where due.
i would not hesitate to give a couple dozen people the title of father/mother/parent of the iPhone. seems quite appropriate and fair.
You could always call him “the father of the capacitive touchscreen”.
Would that make him the grandfather of smartphones?
that’s what the word “inventor” is for
Capacitive touchscreens are the essential technology not just in the iPhone but in all smartphones. Without them we’d still be using flip phones and BlackBerry chiclet keyboards. I think it’s fair to call Johnson the father of the smartphone!
How about father of the touch screen? There’s a fuck ton of technology in smartphones.
There is, but most of that technology was in phones and other devices before smartphones came along.
And touch screens were in devices other than smart phones before smart phones came along.
So again, father of the touchscreen, sure. But he did not make smartphones happen. He has nothing to do with 99% of the technology in smartphones.
Sure, but the touchscreen is arguably the thing that defines a smartphone. It is the part you interact with and the only part the user really sees.
We had phones before capable of surfing the web and taking and editing pictures. Like Blackberry. But those aren’t really seen as smartphones, more like slightly smarter dumbphones.
He invented the capacitive touch screen. The resistive touch screen was in many devices long before smart phones (bank machines being a common example). The resistive touch screen was fine for those applications but it was useless for the smart phone (too slow to respond). The capacitive touch screen’s first killer app was the smartphone, namely the iPhone.
Blue check…
much verified
Least sexist blue check
To be fair, I’d be skeptical if you told me Andy Griffith was the father of 3D printing.
Though I’d google it instead of asking for evidence first.
This is 1874! You’ll be able to sue HER!
Woman make thing!? Me no likely! Woke lie!
Fucking troglodytes.
Seems to be more than that to his question though
https://lemmy.world/comment/9701067
Plus the child comment seems relevant
There are plenty of women in STEM who deserve more recognition. Lise Meitner, discovered nuclear fission. Gladys West, came up with the theory that laid the groundwork for GPS. Grace Hopper, inventor of the program linker, without which modern software development would be impossible. Ada Lovelace, arguably the first programmer ever. But calling a woman whose name is one of two on a patent that furthered the development of a radio communication technique originally devised 40 years earlier by Nikola Tesla which Wi-Fi no longer uses “the mother of Wi-Fi” and putting her on a pedestal just because she’s a woman, parading her (and only her) around every Women’s History Month, and calling anyone who claims she didn’t actually invent Wi-Fi (because she died around the time of its creation) a “troglodyte” is not a good look.
