Data communications week 8 brought a focus on wireless communications.
In the tutorial we worked with some wireless network sniffers to get a deeper understanding of wireless networking. As I was running ubunutu on my laptop I was unable to use the software prescribed (http://www.metageek.net/products/inssider) which is a replacement for NetStumbler.
Instead I had to use Kismet which is an Ubuntu option that was not very user friendly as it ran in the terminal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kismet_(software).
The lecture provided a fairly detailed overview of the evolution of wireless networking. A good overlay of the protocols:
It is interesting to note that modern wifi networking standards can compete with the speed our government is boasting as fiber optic!