Apr 20, 2023 | posted by Conner Williams
We sometimes hear that internet service and WiFi are the same thing, but there is a distinct difference. Internet service is the signal sent from our central office to your home over either fiber lines or copper cabling. WiFi, on the other hand, is the wireless distribution of some of that signal through the air. Devices can then connect to that signal wirelessly and access the internet to stream, game, video chat, and more.
Fun fact: WiFi is not an abbreviation for ‘wireless fidelity’ and it doesn’t actually mean anything. However, around the time WiFi was created, the term Hi-Fi, short for High Fidelity, was a term commonly used to describe the high-quality reproduction of sound or images. In 1999, a group of major companies in the electronics industry formed the nonprofit Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, which is now known as the WiFi Alliance, and they decided to call this new wireless technology WiFi because it was a catchy name and sounded similar to HiFi, which many people were already familiar with. So the name stuck, and we still use it today.
Go back to news feed.