WLAN stick
WLAN sticks or WLAN USB sticks are small, compact RF components equipped with a USB plug and operated in the USB interface.
Functionally, they are Wireless Network Interface Controllers(WNIC) that form a WLAN station together with notebooks, tablet PCs or personalcomputers. The user can use them to dial into a WLAN, surf the Internet or communicate with other subscribers.
WLAN sticks contain the complete RF technology, including the antenna, for dialing into WLANs. They comply with the WLAN standards according to IEEE 802.11, mostly 802.11n, 802 .11g and 802.11b. This can include different modulation methods, as 802.11n uses two- phase shift keying(BPSK), quadrature phase shift keying( QPSK) or quadrature amplitude modulation( QAM), while 802.11g also uses OFDM multiplexing and 802.11b uses spread spectrum( DSSS). Depending on the 802.11 version, the data rates range from 1 Mbit/s and 11 Mbit/s (802.11b) to 54 Mbit/s (802.11g) and 300 Mbit/s for 802.11n. In addition, WLAN sticks have 64/128-bit encryption with Wired Equivalent Privacy(WEP) and WiFi Protected Architecture(WPA).