# We use Wi-Fi every day to connect our devices to the internet, but how does it actually work? How do our devices communicate with the router and what makes Wi-Fi different from other types of wireless communication?
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Its just radio signals. Your phone communicates with the router using radio waves the same way it would communicate with a telephone tower. Ofcourse the communcation itself is very complex but yeah, its radio waves.
The difference between Wi-fi and say bluetooth is frequency, Wifi has very high frequency and often comes in two flavors, 2.4GHz and 5GHz but Wi-fi was far more bandwidth than say Bluetooth and bluetooth is limited to 2.4 GHz at most.
Wow, you went all out with the screaming font.
Humans talk to each other by pushing air back and forth. This movement of air is called sound. So we literally make sound waves that reach your recipients’ ears and it converts it into electricity and sends to their brains. This is the process of talking.
With Wi-Fi, our computers send messages to a radio transmitter (think mouth) which converts the message into a radio wave and sends it into the air. Your router has a radio antenna (think ear) that receives this radio wave and converts it into electricity and sends it on its way.
This is Wi-Fi and all radio communication in a nutshell.
Just as we speak English, Mandarin, Hindi and a million other human languages, Wi-Fi is one specific language that computers use to talk to Wi-Fi routers. It uses a specific range of radio frequency waves and a specific handshake of messages, specific message headers etc as defined in the Wi-Fi specification. This specification is equivalent to, say, an English grammar book or the Ashtadhyayi.
wifi isnt different from other wireless communication.
All wireless communications have a protocol and a frequency range. For example, Morse Code is a protocol for wireless human communication that uses the visible light frequency range.
wifi is just a specific set of protocol and frequencies designed for short range internet traffic.
bluetooth is a set of protocols and frequencies designed for very short range HID device (keyboard, speaker, etc) communication
4G is a set of protocols and frequencies designed for long range high speed internet trafic
5G is a set of protocols and frequencies designed for VERY HIGH SPEED line of sight internet
And a TV remote is a set of protocols and frequencies designed for short range line of sight TV control
etc.
These arent fundamentally different from each other or from morse code. At the end of the day, they are all just blinky “lights” turning on and off.
WiFi is just a special type of radio. Think of walkie-talkies. Instead of voice, though, the signal is just a bunch of “noises” that are used to represent the 1’s and 0’s that computers use for data and communication — binary.’
WiFi has a bunch of channels, like radio stations or TV channels, that it is allowed to send signals on. The radio in your phone or laptop can flip through the channels and send a “who’s out there” message on each and listen for a response. This is what the list of WiFi access points is that you see on your computer or phone.
The data between the computer and the WiFI access point is scrambled to prevent other computers from eavesdropping. This works by the radios exchanging “keys” (numbers that they use to scramble messages). You might be asked for a password, and if you don’t provide it, the WiFi access point won’t send you a key that lets you communicate with it.
Once you’ve connected to the WiFi access point, The computer and the access point send encoded messages back and forth on the channel that the access point is using. Each message consists of a small chunk of data, and information about where it is intended to go, along with the identity of the transmitter so it’s clear which key is used to decipher the message. The Wifi access point then routes messages where they are intended to go.
WiFi only operates on certain channels. The standards for the technology lay out channels, how the digital data is to be represented as a signal, how fast communications are, how the encryption works, how data packets are represented, … every aspect of generating a message, transmitting it, and receiving it securely and robustly.
It mostly differs from other types of wireless communication on how string the signals are, the speed with which data is transmitted, and the whole system of wrapping up and encrypting messages.
Everything with computers is broken down into 1’s and 0’s and WiFi is no exception to this.
When two WiFi devices communicate with each other, they send radio waves that have different properties where the receiver can interpret the signal as a 1 or a 0. By changing properties of the radio wave such as the frequency or phase, the receiver uses that difference to determine if the signal being sent is a 1 or 0, and then creates a complete message from that information.
It’s wireless. So normally everything is connected with wires. When you want to wirelessly communicate, you disconnect the respective devices – they see to which other device they are not connected with a cable and use this lack of wire to communicate.
It isn’t different. WiFi is radio frequency. Your router is a radio transmitter – receiver, your phone is a radio transmitter receiver. Instead of talking, “Hey, y’all, this is Pea Packer on the Interstate, come back now, over”, or pounding out morse code, “dit dit dah dit” your transceivers are sending streams of zeros and ones, which the computers inside the transceivers turn into Tik Toks and advertisements for sneakers.
AM shock jocks and Come to Jesus – Radio
FM easy listening music – Radio
CB for truckers – Radio
Sparky Morse transmission for Marconis – Radio
GPS Satellite Navigation – Radio
WiFi and Apple and Android (Oh my!) – Radio
Old style TV – Radio
Cable TV – Radio
Walkie-Talkie on your cell phone – Radio with a Radio
HF/VHF/UHF/LF airplane and military comms – Radio
Fiber internet – light over the fiber to the router, then converted to WiFi Radio
Wi-Fi is like magic that lets our gadgets talk to the internet without any wires. Your phone or laptop sends signals to a Wi-Fi router, which acts like a traffic cop directing those signals. It’s different from older wireless stuff because it’s fast and lets lots of devices connect at once. Basically, it’s like your own private radio station just for internet stuff. So when you’re streaming videos or scrolling through socials, you’re basically using this cool invisible internet highway.
Really deep question that requires several undergraduate and graduate level electrical engineering and computer science classes to thoroughly answer (Google “introduction to digital communications” if you care) but this is ELI5 so I’ll bite.
A few centuries ago, scientists realized the following natural phenomenon: if you put electricity (more precisely an alternating current) through a piece of metal, a tiny voltage would appear on other nearby pieces of metal too. All of digital communications (whether WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, car remote key etc.) is about exploiting this phenomenon to send information in a reliable way. A few subproblems involve include: How to represent digital information in a way that’s resistant to distortion (similar to a QR code)? How to undo said distortion at the receiver? How can multiple devices cooperate and take turn in transmitting and receiving? How to stop eavesdropping? How to chop data into multiple transmissions and reconstitute it on the other hand? How to compress (reduce) the volume of data to transmit in a reversible way? How to verify that the data received is correct? How to ask the transmitter to resend incorrect data? How to signal where the data transmitted needs to be delivered?
The rabbit hole goes deep and spans multiple specialties from analog software design all the way up to JavaScript programming.
Fundamentally the main question has been answered by others.. However, there are thousands of pages of specifications in the IEEE 802.11 group of international standards that guide implementation and interoperability. Hundreds of people fly all over the world 6 times a year to meet and discuss what’s next!
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