what basically is "wifi"?can anyone explain in detail???

Answer 1

Whats left to say?

Answer 2

You ask what wifi is BASICALLY, but also want to know in DETAIL... well, somebody has beat me to the details (first user to answer you), but basically it is like a cordless phone. We used to use wires to call people, but then somebody figured out we could use frequencies to carry the signal through the air. The same concept with WiFi, we used to (and still do in crucial circumstances) connect our computers to the Internet with a Cat5 Cable (basically a phone line with twice as many wires), but somebody figured out how to make our computers connect the same way cordless phones did...

Answer 3

Wireless fidelity
or Wi-Fi for short

In lay-man's terms:
A wireless local area network:
Which is a (wireless) computer network covering a small local area, like a home, office, or small group of buildings such as a home, office, or college.

Answer 4

Wi-Fi (also WiFi, Wi-fi, Wifi, or wifi) is a brand originally licensed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to describe the underlying technology of wireless local area networks (WLAN) based on the IEEE 802.11 specifications. Wi-Fi is now so pervasive, and the term so generic, that the brand is no longer protected[citation needed] and it appears in Webster's dictionary.

Wi-Fi was intended to be used for mobile computing devices, such as laptops, in LANs, but is now often used for increasingly more applications, including Internet and VoIP phone access, gaming, and basic connectivity of consumer electronics such as televisions and DVD players. There are even more standards in development that will allow Wi-Fi to be used by cars in highways in support of an Intelligent Transportation System to increase safety, gather statistics, and enable mobile commerce IEEE 802.11p.

A person with a Wi-Fi device, such as a computer, telephone, or personal digital assistant (PDA) can connect to the Internet when in proximity of an access point. The region covered by one or several access points is called a hotspot. Hotspots can range from a single room to many square miles of overlapping hotspots. Wi-Fi can also be used to create a Wireless mesh network. Both architectures are used in Wireless community network, municipal wireless networks like CyberSpot in St. Cloud, Florida, and metro-scale networks like WAZTempe in Tempe, AZ.

Wi-Fi also allows connectivity in peer-to-peer mode, which enables devices to connect directly with each other. This connectivity mode is useful in consumer electronics and gaming applications.

When the technology was first commercialized there were many problems because consumers could not be sure that products from different vendors would work together. The Wi-Fi Alliance began as a community to solve this issue so as to address the needs of the end user and allow the technology to mature. The Alliance created another brand "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED" to denote products are interoperable with other products displaying the "Wi-Fi CERTIFIED" brand.


The typical Wi-Fi setup contains one or more Access Points (APs) and one or more clients. An AP broadcasts its SSID (Service Set Identifier, Network name) via packets that are called beacons, which are broadcast every 100 ms. The beacons are transmitted at 1 Mbit/s, and are relatively short and therefore are not of influence on performance. Since 1 Mbit/s is the lowest rate of Wi-Fi it assures that the client who receives the beacon can communicate at least 1 Mbit/s. Based on the settings (e.g. the SSID), the client may decide whether to connect to an AP. Also the firmware running on the client Wi-Fi card is of influence. Say two APs of the same SSID are in range of the client, the firmware may decide based on signal strength to which of the two APs it will connect. The Wi-Fi standard leaves connection criteria and roaming totally open to the client. This is a strength of Wi-Fi, but also means that one wireless adapter may perform substantially better than the other. Since Wi-Fi transmits in the air, it has the same properties as a non-switched ethernet network. Even collisions can therefore appear like in non-switched ethernet LAN's.

Answer 5

it allows you to use a network without using a cable by transmitting the network wirelessly

Stands for Wireless Fidelity.