Who doesn't love wireless? Surfing the Web while sipping a latte at your lavorite cafe certainly beats being chained to a modem by a data cable. But for applications ttiat demand a really fast connection, such as watching live high-definition television, today's WiFi falls short. The fastest WiFi available maxes out at 600 million bits per second, fine for watching a clip from YouTube but far from the billions of bits per second that HDTV can require. The reason for WiFi's limit is that the equipment it uses typically operates at radio frequencies just above 2.4 gigahertz. All else being equal, there is a direct relationship between the frequency of a wave and the amount of data it can carry: The higher it goes, the more data you can squeeze in. However, the higher the frequency, the more it costs to build the corresponding radio hardware.
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