If you’ve been in an airport, coffee shop, library or hotel recently, chances are you’ve been right in the middle of a wireless network. Many people also use wireless networking, also called WiFi or 802.11 networking, to connect their computers at home, and some cities are trying to use the technology to provide free or low-cost Internet access to residents. In the near future, wireless networking may become so widespread that you can access the Internet just about anywhere at any time, without using wires.

WiFi has a lot of advantages. Wireless networks are easy to set up and inexpensive. They’re also unobtrusive — unless you’re on the lookout for a place to watch streaming movies on your tablet, you may not even notice when you’re in a hotspot.

Now, let’s look at a few of the areas in a wireless network that will give you a baseline for determining if your WiFi signal is being sapped unexpectedly.  A WiFi network is comprised of a broadband Internet connection from service providers and you attach the WiFi controllers and WiFi Access Point (AP), which distributes the signal and creates a network to you smartphones and laptops.

There are also a couple of important terms related to WiFi that you should know. A service set identifier (SSID) is the name that identifies a wireless network. By default, this will probably be the name of your router — Netgear or ASUS or something similar — but you can have fun by changing it to something more personal or creative, like Abraham Linksys.

Today’s most commonly used WiFi speed, 802.11n, is capable of up to 600 megabit per second data transfers. 802.11ac is the next standard, which will allow for wireless speeds of over one gigabit per second. 2.4GHz and 5GHz are two different wireless frequencies used in wireless routers.