The usage of internet has become more indispensible and with professionals constantly on the move the need for internet services to go wireless is becoming high. The advantages of wireless internet services are very high. The limit to which the advantages of wireless internet services can be exploited based on the coverage and connectivity provided by the service provider. However, one factor that cannot be compromised is the sped. Imagine you are holidaying in a remote hill station and you badly want to watch the cricket match for the day. If the video frames are playing at the slowest frame rate, it is very natural that ultimately you will lose the patience and interest. Thus speed plays a vital role in these technologies. Thus provision of high speed to maintain the consistency of the frames of a video is what the high speed wireless internet providers target.

There are many types of high speed wireless internet and these differ primarily on the devices used for establishing the connectivity.

Types of High Speed Wireless Internet

One of the traditional means is to make use of the Wi-Fi zones. These are commonly called “hot spots”. These are wireless fidelity spots which provide internet connection from a common access point. The hot spots are usually supported by internet cafes and other places of interest like the coffee shops where people can access internet with their laptops or notebooks. Some hot spots charge while others provide free services and are called free spots. These zones make use of the 802.11 standard. More advanced versions of the standard provide for high speeds and 802.11n where n stands for next generation offers speeds as high as 100Mbps.

Another technology providing high speed wireless internet is the cellular internet or mobile internet. These are base stations operating at a particular frequency and a interconnection of various base stations via a public switched telephone network (PSTN) provides the required wireless connectivity. This form of high speed network commonly uses the GPRS and 3G technologies which support high speed transfer of almost any type of frame.

The above two standards provide security by means of protocols and encryption standards. The most secure form however is the satellite based internet. This offers more secured means of high speed wireless internet. These have an antenna and a transmitter in addition to regular modems.

Other advanced technologies using the advantages of all the above three technologies have come up namely the virtual private network (VPN) and Bluetooth. Bluetooth is the emerging trend offering incredible speed of about 2 Mbps. But the data transfer is restricted to smaller distances and only peer to peer services are possible with this.

The service providers are Boston Communications Group, Dobson Communications Group for cellular internet, T-Mobile, Boingo for Wi-Max and Satmex, PanAmSat, Intelsat for satellite services. The current speed of high speed wireless internet is about 2 MBPS and with the upcoming 4G technology, speeds as high as 20Mbps are possible. Thus high speed wireless internet is a reality.