Networks
Wi-Fi is a shared medium, and that explains most of your problems
Wireless networking is not a pipe. It is a room where everyone has to take turns speaking, and the rules are stricter than they…
Grigor Petrov
Hardware writer, Tech Behind Things
Grigor writes about silicon, thermals and the physical limits designers keep bumping into.
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17 articles
Networks
Your packets do not take the route you think they do
The path between you and a website is decided by commercial agreements as much as by geography.
Devices
Why the storage in your device is slower than the number on the box
Flash memory has several tiers of behaviour hidden behind one advertised figure, and the fast one runs out.
Devices
OLED and LCD fail in opposite ways
One emits light per pixel and one filters a single backlight, and almost every difference in behaviour follows from that.
Devices
How an e-reader holds a page with the power switched off
Electronic paper moves physical pigment rather than emitting light, which explains the battery life, the sunlight readability and…
Networks
Why 5G often feels exactly like 4G
The label covers several different radio bands with wildly different behaviour, and most people are connected to the least exciting…
Networks
Your upload speed is the number that decides how the connection feels
Consumer broadband is deliberately lopsided, and the small number is the one that breaks video calls.
Networks
How a VPN actually moves your traffic, and what it moves it away from
A tunnel changes who can see your traffic and where it appears to come from. Those are the only two things it changes.
Devices
How a phone fakes the click of a button that does not exist
A sealed slab of glass has no moving keys, so it throws a tiny weight against a spring and lets your nervous system fill in the…
Devices
Automatic brightness is guessing what your eyes have already adapted to
The sensor reads one number from a narrow cone of the room, and your vision has been quietly changing its own reference the whole…
Devices
The moving parts inside a phone are etched, not assembled
Springs, weights and combs a few microns across are carved out of one piece of silicon, and then asked to survive being dropped.
Networks
A repeater spends half its airtime repeating, and that half was yours
Relaying a frame means transmitting it twice on one channel. Everything else about mesh networking follows from that single…
Networks
A SIM card is a small computer that proves who you are
It does not store your phone number and it never hands over its secret. It answers a puzzle the network sets, and that is the whole…
Networks
Twisting the pairs is the entire reason an Ethernet cable works
Four pairs of copper carry gigabits past motors, fluorescent lights and each other, and the twist rate is what makes that possible.
Networks
The page you loaded probably came from a building a few miles away
The company whose name is on the site may have had nothing to do with delivering it. Most of the web is served by intermediaries.
Networks
How a strand of glass carries a signal for a hundred kilometres
Light stays inside the fibre because the glass around the core bends it back, and the glass is purer than almost anything else…
Networks
Satellite internet trades altitude for delay, and the trade decides everything
Put the satellite high and it stays still but the round trip is long. Put it low and the delay collapses, along with the simplicity.