how are we able to have hundreds or thousands of wireless devices sending and receiving signals within range of each other without any of those waves going through the air interfering with one another and corrupting data?
In: Technology
First of all, there’s very few cases where there’s literally hundreds of thousands of devices attempting to operate on similiar wavelengths in an area similiar to the effective range of those communications. If you think of a worst case scenario like an absolutely packed mega-event, you’d have maybe 60,000 people in a small enough area where they’d be connecting to the same for example, 4G services.
In any case, all digital wireless communications protocols have built in error detection and correction methods. In short – every time you DO use anything wireless even if it seems like it’s working great, there are corrupted packets that are being discarded. The worse the signal and the noisier the enviornment, the less packets of data that get through unscathed. For the most part, you don’t notice the difference because the theoretical maximum bandwidth of 802.11ac is 6.9Gbps – Are you really going to notice a huge difference if it’s only working at ~1/7th capacity (1Gbps), especially if your home internet connection isn’t even that fast?
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