About the project
An independent project that teaches networking as it actually behaves, from the socket API down to the radio waves.
Layers I cover
I cover OSI layers 7, 4, 3, 2 and 1.
// L5 and L6 mostly live inside L7 these days
Built by a teacher who has chased dropped packets.
I spent thirty-one years teaching radio frequency theory to students who mostly wanted to know when the bell would ring. A handful of them got it. Really got it, the way you get a joke or a melody. Those are the ones who kept writing to me after graduation, asking why their Wi-Fi dropped out behind the brick wall in the garage.
That question, by the way, has an answer. Brick absorbs 2.4 GHz signal with a kind of rude efficiency. Most people never find out why. They just unplug the router, plug it back in, and call it fixed.
I retired four years ago. My wife says I retired from the classroom but not from the subject, and she's right. I still think in waveforms. I still catch myself explaining Fresnel zones to the dog.
I'm not here to sell you a certification or dress this up as some grand digital transformation of your career. I'm an old teacher who likes explaining things and has weird opinions about antenna placement. Expect plain language, actual diagrams, and the occasional rant about how decibels get mangled in marketing copy.
Grab a coffee. Let's talk about signal.
- Oliver C.
How I teach.
I want the whole run from software to signal to make sense to anyone who writes code or keeps a network alive.
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Bottom-up, then top-down
I follow what the code sees all the way to the antenna, then climb back. Each idea gets pinned to something you can watch happen on a screen.
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Measure, don't guess
Packet captures, spectrum plots and signal readings beat vendor folklore every time. I trusted a signal bar for years before I learned to distrust it.
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Vendor-neutral, always
No sponsored rankings. No affiliate links. I name hardware when the hardware genuinely matters, and that happens less than you'd think.
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Numbers you can use
Every rule of thumb arrives with the math under it, so you know the day it stops holding and starts quietly lying to you.
A short timeline of the connection.
The stack I teach took fifty years to assemble. These are the moments that shaped how your packets travel today.
- 1974
A protocol for packet networks
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn publish the design that becomes TCP/IP: a way to connect different networks into one internetwork.
- 1981
RFC 791 and RFC 793
IP and TCP are written down as the specifications that, with later updates, still define them today.
- 1983
Flag day and Berkeley sockets
ARPANET switches to TCP/IP on January 1. Later that year, 4.2BSD ships the sockets API that almost every language still wraps.
- 1985
Unlicensed spectrum opens
The FCC allows unlicensed spread-spectrum use of the ISM bands, including 2.4 GHz, which made consumer wireless networking possible.
- 1997
IEEE 802.11
The first Wi-Fi standard is published: 1 and 2 Mbit/s in the 2.4 GHz band.
- 1999
802.11b, 802.11a and a brand
11 Mbit/s at 2.4 GHz and 54 Mbit/s at 5 GHz. The group that becomes the Wi-Fi Alliance forms and gives the technology its name.
- 2009
802.11n (Wi-Fi 4)
MIMO arrives: multiple antennas and spatial streams turn multipath from a problem into an advantage.
- 2013
802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5)
Wider 80 and 160 MHz channels and denser modulation in the 5 GHz band.
- 2019
Wi-Fi 6 certification
OFDMA lets one transmission serve several clients at once - a feature built for crowded networks.
- 2020
6 GHz opens
The FCC makes 1,200 MHz of spectrum around 6 GHz available for unlicensed use, creating Wi-Fi 6E.
- 2024
Wi-Fi 7
Certification launches for 802.11be, with 320 MHz channels and multi-link operation across bands.