Wi-Fi. Ellie Rennie
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For most users, Wi-Fi remains a cheap consumer ‘add-on’, with base stations often built into inexpensive internet access points provided by internet service providers. The low-cost model, a key reason for Wi-Fi’s success, probably also explains relative underinvestment in Wi-Fi compared to other wireless technologies. Newer modes of wireless connection, including the higher-speed cellular broadband services marketed as 5G, now promise higher speeds and greater security, alongside more lucrative returns for telecommunications firms, and a new upgrade cycle for smartphone manufacturers.
So why a book about Wi-Fi at this time? The experiences of 2020 underline some of the reasons why Wi-Fi matters, and is likely to matter more in the future, and why we need to understand it better than we do. When we think about how Wi-Fi has been used in the two emergencies, the bushfires and the pandemic, we can readily compare the responsive problem-solving demonstrated in the aftermath of the Australian fires with the adaptability of connected people and organizations during the pandemic. In both cases, Wi-Fi appears as a means for restoring capabilities which had been swept away, a means for managing exceptionally difficult circumstances. For those sheltering from the fires in remote townships, Wi-Fi was deployed in new ways to provide emergency support and relief for everyone with a device to connect. Reconnection was critically important for both stranded urban holiday-makers and the residents of small coastal towns, regardless of the considerable social and economic differences between these populations. Wi-Fi services in the wake of the bushfires were usually offered by telecommunications companies, which used Wi-Fi to stand in for damaged infrastructure. For those sheltering from the pandemic at home, Wi-Fi was also an essential digital resource – a means for continuity in work, education, entertainment, and social links. In the case of the pandemic, Wi-Fi was usually self-provided, in order to extend networks within households. In these circumstances, we have also seen sharply differentiated social consequences, a magnification of digital inequalities. For those without vital digital connections at home, the risk of exposure to the virus also increased, just as the absence of connectivity increased the risk of the fires.
This book shows how, in ways and circumstances other than catastrophes, Wi-Fi continues to provide vital connections. At the same time, Wi-Fi changes the way people connect with each other, media, and digital services. Internet scholars have written about how the internet ‘reconfigures access’ to resources (Dutton, 2005). Online news services, for example, may reinforce people’s interest in the news, by making news content more readily accessible; they can also change the kind of news people encounter, by presenting alternative sources of news. Wi-Fi invites us to consider how a flexible and affordable wireless medium may reconfigure access to the internet itself, both by making the internet more accessible across diverse physical and social locations, and by changing the ways in which people use it. The fact that Wi-Fi augments and extends networks from their edges should not lead us to underestimate its significance: it is possible to change the internet from its edges. Just as Wi-Fi is now enabling the proliferation of connected devices in households, a decade ago Wi-Fi played a key role in the evolution of smartphone ecosystems, providing a low-cost parallel network ideal for backups, downloads, system maintenance, synching, and all those data-intensive tasks best kept off more expensive cellular networks.
The events of 2020 give us some clues as to how this ‘reconfiguring’ works. Wi-Fi introduces a plasticity to network connections both within specific spaces and situations, such as households or cafés, and in wider public, institutional, and community settings. It does this in an unusual set of ways. We can think of Wi-Fi as ‘entangled infrastructure’, because its applications and utility are so dependent on their social and locational contexts. Wi-Fi is inexpensive to build into devices, and it provides access to the cheapest data available – usually from fixed broadband connections rather than cellular data. These qualities help us to deal with a whole range of urgent and contemporary problems, from the demands of home-based schoolwork to the communication needs of people in both extraordinary and everyday difficulties.
Wi-Fi therefore reminds us that the internet need not only be about corporate software, national rivalries, and vastly powerful platforms. It can also be successfully designed for cheap devices and open standards. However, the plasticity of Wi-Fi is not unlimited. Larger-scale network infrastructures, market dynamics, and public policy settings all play substantial parts in determining where and how people can connect. Despite the flexibility and popularity of Wi-Fi, internet access remains a scarce and expensive resource in many situations and places. While climate and health disasters underline the contingencies and fragilities of the communication systems many of us take for granted, everyday access to inexpensive, reliable internet is a daunting problem for large numbers of people, especially – but not only – in low- and middle-income countries. Mobile broadband has extended access to digital services and participation in the digital economy, but data costs remain high. According to the Alliance for Affordable Internet (2019), although progress is being made in some countries, the world is still decades away from universal, affordable internet access. Moreover, the network effects of the internet mean that, as more people are connected, the costs of disconnection – those disadvantages incurred by people who are wholly or partially excluded – also increase.
According to the International Monetary Fund (2020, p. xv), the world after Covid-19 is likely to be poorer and more unequal for many years to come. The pandemic has reversed global progress in reducing poverty, with only a protracted and gradual recovery expected. If we think about the impact of the pandemic on digital inequality, we see a particularly fluid and challenging dynamic. Governments and businesses are responding to Covid-19 by hastening the transition to online services. While digital transformation has many benefits, it also magnifies the problem of digital inequality – a problem with no simple fix, and many dimensions: it involves access to networks, devices, applications, and content; the cultivation of a diverse range of skills and capabilities. Digital inclusion is also about affordability – what proportion of people’s incomes do we expect them to pay for essential communication and services? Wi-Fi networks have the potential to address directly problems of access and cost, and can contribute indirectly to boosting skills and capacities. This is why, in August 2020, the South Korean government announced plans to install 41,000 free public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2022, and to upgrade 18,000 older installations (Cho, 2020). It appears that Wi-Fi will continue to matter, and its role may grow in importance.
Wi-Fi through past and present
In the chapters that follow, we explore the historical trajectories of Wi-Fi in order to illuminate its present significance. We discuss Wi-Fi’s deep foundations in twentieth-century theories of wireless communication; its more immediate origins in the 1970s and 1980s, in wireless network experimentation and spectrum policymaking; its emergence as a focus of public and commercial research and development in the 1980s and 1990s; and its subsequent status as an evolving set of technical protocols supporting an accelerating proliferation of devices and ‘smart’ technologies. Our approach throughout is not to focus on the technical aspects of Wi-Fi – we note that the relevant standards in any case comprise a large and evolving group of technologies – but on its social and institutional contexts, its uses and applications.
We have already begun to sketch the place of Wi-Fi in contemporary digital experience. We now turn to a closer consideration of what its history tells us about the significance of Wi-Fi in its many guises – as marketing strategy, as technical protocol, as open industry standard, as public utility, and as intellectual property. Wi-Fi raises intriguing questions: about the prominent visibility of this embedded, mainly hidden form of infrastructure; about the control and ownership of Wi-Fi’s open standards; and about the place of Wi-Fi between the commercial tech industries, public utility, and the worlds of low-cost community and domestic networks. In order to address these questions, we can draw on both recent developments and some salient lessons from Wi-Fi’s complex past.
Wi-Fi is a brand
When Steve Jobs unveiled the iBook laptop, he didn’t talk about Wi-Fi – the wireless networking features were branded with an Apple trademark, ‘AirPort’, conveying the idea that these industry standard capabilities would be ‘first and