When the situation allows, wireless communication (or just wireless) is the movement of information between two or more places without the need of an electrical conductor as a medium. Radio waves are used in the most prevalent wireless technology. The intended distances for radio waves can range from a few meters for Bluetooth to millions of kilometers for deep-space radio communications.

It includes two-way radios, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless networking, among other fixed, mobile, and portable applications. GPS devices, garage door openers, wireless computer mice, keyboards, and headsets, headphones, radio receivers, satellite television, broadcast television, and cordless telephones are all examples of radio wireless technology uses.

Other electromagnetic wireless technologies, such as light, magnetic, or electric fields, or the use of sound, are rather less prevalent means of creating wireless communications.

Wireless has been used twice in the history of communications, each time with a somewhat different connotation. It was first used about 1890 for the earliest radio transmitting and receiving technologies, such as wireless telegraphy until it was superseded by the new word radio around 1920. In the United Kingdom, non-portable radios were still referred to as wireless sets throughout the 1960s.

The name was resurrected in the 1980s and 1990s to distinguish digital devices that communicate without the need of wires, such as those described in the preceding paragraph, from those that do. Due to the introduction of mobile broadband, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth in the 2000s, this became its major use.

Wireless operations enable services that would be difficult or impractical to perform via cables, such as mobile and interplanetary communications. The phrase is frequently used in the telecommunications sector to refer to telecommunications systems (e.g., radio transmitters and receivers, remote controls, etc.) that convey information without cables using some type of energy (e.g., radio waves, acoustic energy, etc.). This method is used to transmit data across short and long distances.

In 1880, Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter created the photophone, a telephone that conveyed audio through a light beam, resulting in the first wireless telephone call. Sunlight and a clear line of sight between the transmitter and receiver were necessary for the photophone to work. These issues significantly reduced the photophone’s feasibility in any practical application. The concepts of the photophone would take several decades to find their first practical applications in military communications and then in fiber-optic communications.

Before effective radio systems became available, several wireless electrical signaling techniques were studied for telegraphy, including transmitting electric currents through water and the Earth using electrostatic and electromagnetic induction. A patented induction system by Thomas Edison allowed a telegraph on a moving train to connect with telegraph wires running parallel to the tracks, an induction telegraph system by William Preece for sending messages across bodies of water, and several operational proposed telegraphy and voice earth conduction systems.

During the Great Blizzard of 1888, the Edison system was utilized by stranded trains, and conductive earth networks were employed between trenches in World War I, but these systems were never commercially viable.

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