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.
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.
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.
It actually is. The original standard published by the IEEE 802.11 group was 802.11, often referred to as 802.11 prime.
To put it simply, it was little more than a proof of concept. The only wireless cards that I know were made at that time, were very expensive and only purchased in very limited amounts by large corporations. Quickly afterwards it was replaced by 802.11a and 802.11b. the big difference between the two, was that b used 2.4ghz and could achieve 11mbps, while a used 5Ghz, and could achieve 54mbps.
Meanwhile prime was on 900mhz and if memory serves, never achieved more than a few Mbps.
802.11b was more popular because 2.4ghz was easier to make inexpensively at the time, and so 802.11g also used 2.4ghz, but was able to increase bandwidth by using OFDM. But now I'm off topic, I just find wireless history very interesting.
The point is 802.11 (prime) was a valid wireless standard.
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
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... It's one (important) contribution to technology. And it's not always that one single person invents the whole concept of a radio. Or a car. And get's to be the whole parent of it. Things build upon each other. Sometimes it needs a lot of contributions of several individuals to make something possible... Nowadays more so than in the old times.
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.
Or rather she was part of a team, with her husband and one more, that patented that idea, never really got it to work in real torpedos, and the technology was forgotten until someone referred to it in a later patent. Then her role as background got expanded to take the role of other more influential women, maybe because she had a nicer picture.
For the Bluetooth development, the developers of the technology didn't know about her patent until their IP department was about to file for a patent. They added this patent to the list and then they got connected. As is the case with many, patent and patent connections. It's a quite common way of how patents are connected, and part of the IP industry. R&D people come up with an idea, these people don't read tons of patents but solve issues in an intuitive way. Then IP lawers dig into existing patents and make the legal connections.
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.
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
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".
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.
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".
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
This post is inaccurate. Neither WiFi nor GPS use FHSS, nor is Lamarr anything close to singularly credited with FHSS' invention (the earliest patent is credited to Nikola Tesla). This also implies that the Allies used her parent - they did not.
Also Richard Easton is the son of the man who invented GPS and had every right to be skeptical of this claim, and it looks like Internet dipsh*ts have bullied him into deleting his twitter account over this.
No one's 'taking' credit, others are ascribing credit. For technological concepts that were foundational, if no longer used. It's like cracking the shits at someone mentioning the hominid that came up with knapping a stone because your dad made scalpels.
Yeah you're correct I misspoke there. I'm not an expert but others are suggesting her invention wasn't used in GPS at all, which the guy's dad is credited with inventing. If that's true that's still a little weird, of course I don't have a problem with her getting credit for anything she invented. I certainly haven't invented anything
This is mostly wrong: while she did invent what would later be called Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS), it isn't used in modern WiFi or in GPS. It is used in Bluetooth though.
I should point out that techniques like FHSS are only a part of what makes up a radio communication method. You can't say it was "the basis of Bluetooth" just because FHSS is one of the many technologies used in Bluetooth. She certainly contributed though.
That's an incredibly sensationalistic way to put it. By that logic, the ancient greeks are the forefathers of WiFi, because they figured how to create static electricity using cotton and ambar.
You can (and should) give credit without overstating their achievement.
