Wi-Fi Foundations 101 (Preview)

My name is Rick Murphy. I’m from How Wireless Works, and thank you for attending our short presentation today. This WiFi training is a two session event that covers the basics and introduction to Wi-Fi, 802.11 and WLAN Networking. In this course, we will cover some basic fundamental material, but don’t let that throw you.

This WiFi training course presented by How Wireless works is also known as AirMagnet AM-101, the essentials of WLANs are about to be shown. This course is intended for Network Administrators, Network Managers, IT Sales Professionals, IT Marketing Professionals, Help Desk Technicians, Support Technicians Field Technicians and Network Developer.

But let me go a little deeper than that. Here at How Wireless Works, our concern and our goal, is to help improve the WLAN industry. We hear constantly how Wi-Fi has become an ingrained part of today’s business, how it’s business critical that the Wi-Fi platform operates properly and in so many cases, it just doesn’t work the way it could and should.

Our goal here at How Wireless Works is to help you become better, more adept at implementing, maintaining, troubleshooting, designing and deploying new WLANs. To begin with, it’s very important that you have a basic understanding of what the mechanics of Wi-Fi are. In order to understand this course, I highly recommend that you have taken as a pre-requisite, some type of basic intro to networking.

For instance, our How Wireless Works presentation by Devon Akin is highly recommended. I think that’s probably the most current and most far reaching in-depth presentation delivered in a two-day format you’ll find and it’s called the Fundamentals of Basic Routing and Switching.

Even though this is an entry level, basic, fundamental course, we’re going to go fairly detailed into the standard and the mechanics and even some of the vendor specific implementations of Wi-Fi. Don’t let that scare you. We’ll take it slow. We’ll go into the water a little at a time till it gets a little deeper and a little deeper until finally, you’ll be swimming with the rest of the sharks.

In this Wi-Fi training, we will have six chapters. The first one, chapter one, is the “Top 10 Must Knows of WLANs”. We made these top ten issues that are concerns about Wireless LANs. These are issues that people will frequently talk to us about, and things that are considered most important for you to understand about how Wireless LANs work.

WLANs are not like cellular communications. They’re not like Metropolitan Area Networking. They’re of their own design and because they’re simple and meant to be shared by the masses, there are a lot of restrictions in Wireless LANs that make them not as high performance and so clearly and cleanly workable in today’s business climate.

Then we’re going to take a look at a review of organizations. In chapter two, will just hit the highlights of several of the organizations that have an effect on the evolution of Wireless LANs, the placement and the way that Wireless LANs operate in today’s climate. I’m hoping that you would have had the chance to take Devon’s course where he goes much more much more detail into these organizations, the regulatory aspects of it and also the OSI model.

We’ll just do a high level review just to get everybody back up to speed on these issues. That way, we can spend more time getting into the meat and potatoes of this course, which are chapters three, four and five. We’ll look at chapter three which is a discussion of Wi-Fi stations and the radios within a Wi-Fi station that will allow these communications to happen. Then we’ll talk about the different types of stations that we have today, and the different forms that we use to access our content and our personal social networking capabilities such as the social networking platforms that are out there.

It’s because of the Wi-Fi radios built into today’s communications platforms, that we’re able to have all this freedom to move around, to stay in touch with friends, family and loved ones and also business associates. All starts with a Wi-Fi station. After we have this high level Wi-Fi station discussion, we’re going to go down into Chapter 4, The Physical Layer.

Those of you who have taken an introductory course, know that the physical layer refers to layer one of the OSI model and at the physical layer, this is where the communications actually happens. This is where the bits are modulated onto some type of carrier and transmitted over RF or a radio frequency mechanisms.

So, this is a very very important part of understanding Wi-Fi. There will be many of you who have an understanding or background in RF possibly from the military or from other jobs in other forms of communications like radio and television broadcast transmissions. Your knowledge of RF in those technologies will be very very valuable to you if you’re transitioning over to Wireless LAN professionalism.

But there are differences. And some of the differences will be astonishing. For instance, when we talk about unlicensed bands of frequencies that are available for Wi-Fi compared to the license bands that are used in some of the higher level more capable communications technologies, you’ll find that that puts some real restrictions on us, and understanding these restrictions is key to making your Wi-Fi networks work properly.

Once we finishing discussing the physical layer, we’ll go into the data link layer. Again, referring back to the OSI model. The data link layer is the second layer up. It’s layer two of the OSI model, and this is where the communications are formatted. This is where we have the protocol itself that exists in Wi-Fi, and this is what allows us to share the medium among multiple users and allows us to access our data at different rates as we move throughout the environment.

After the data link layer, Chapter 5, we’ll go into just a final wrap up summary chapter, Chapter 6. What’s next? And in this chapter, I’d just like to present you with opportunities where you can go after this course, out into the field. What this course is preparing you for, a wrap up of the materials that we’ve discovered and hopefully, prepare you to take your next steps in Wi-Fi.