Technology, Wireless

The evolution of communication among deaf people, aside from the trend from person-to-person toward remote communication using devices, has changed dramatically in the decade of 2000. Prior to that, beginning in the late 1960s, the main form of remote communication was the use of teletypewriters, or TTYs (telecommunication devices for the deaf), a wired form of communication requiring users to be tethered to a wired connection, in either their home or their place of work. Over time, since 2000, the tethering link has weakened (or lessened) to a wireless form, meaning a deaf person does not have to be inside a home or workplace to be able to communicate using a device. This has lagged deaf individuals’ hearing counterparts by about 5–10 years, as the hearing started to resort to communicating via voice using cellular phones in the 1990s. Interestingly, this lapse is much shorter than the lapse between the invention by Alexander Graham Bell of the telephone in the late 1880s and the access to telephonic communication in the form of TTYs by deaf people in the late 1960s.

The advent of wireless communication represents a major step for deaf people to reach functional equivalence using devices to communicate with parties remotely like their hearing counterparts. The term functional equivalence has been the major legal standard used by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in regulating the relay services in the United States. This has been defined in Title IV of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Wireless, in, of, and by itself, is a generic term. It signifies signals in the air using a radio spectrum allocated by the FCC for that purpose. Television signals, for example, use part of that spectrum but a different allocation than cellular phones or pagers so that their signals do not interfere with each other. There are dozens of wireless spectrums; for example, cellular has its own, and paging networks have their own. The difference here is that hardwired networks do not have wireless spectrums allocated because they are dedicated channels and are shielded to avoid interference. However, there are situations where signals from a cellular network are converted to a wired network in the house or to a Wi-Fi network. In a majority of cases, a Wi-Fi network is dedicated to an area depending on the strength of the Wi-Fi router being used. Some Wi-Fi networks have signal strengths that are limited to a 100-foot radius; others are bigger than that. To extend the strength of a Wi-Fi network, some use what is called a repeater or a wireless access point, which acts as a bridge to further or extend the signal of the Wi-Fi network.

In today’s world (2013), most wireless communication takes place with cellular and Wi-Fi technology. Cellular uses locally placed towers (or cells) in an area, and when a person moves about within that area, the cellular signal linked to the person’s device is passed from one tower to [Page 956]another. Wi-Fi, in most cases, starts with a hardwired (Ethernet) connection to a router that is designed to transmit Wi-Fi signals to an area. Telephone companies usually provide cellular and hardwired connections. Cable companies usually provide hardwired connections. Bluetooth is another wireless feature, but its use has usually been related to device-to-device connection via wireless, rather than for communication purposes.

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