Wi-Fi. Ellie Rennie
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or revised versions in response to known and anticipated problems. After all, Wi-Fi does something inherently difficult: it transmits and receives large volumes of data from multiple users using shared radio frequencies in spaces that are not designed for the purpose. The problems are manifold: wireless networks must deal with interference from devices using the same frequencies; they must provide secure communications; within buildings, transmissions need to deal with physical objects, especially walls and floors, which signals can bounce off or fail to pass through. Revised and faster versions of Wi-Fi need to deal with devices using older versions: do these slow down the entire network? As additional and different kinds of connected devices appear – such as phones, tablets, and smart TVs – how do we manage the multiplying number of connections? And, as more of those devices are battery powered, and as energy consumption across the network becomes an increasingly pressing question, how do we increase the overall efficiency of the system?
The recent history of Wi-Fi is often framed around a progressive narrative about increasing network speeds, where each new version of the technology generates an impressive leap in the claims made about maximum bit rates – claims which rarely translate directly into reality. Although improvements in speed are important, the many iterations of Wi-Fi (and the resulting alphabet soup) are better understood as an accretion of new technical solutions within the overall assemblage, together with evolutionary improvements in the core capabilities.
Wi-Fi’s histories are diverse and contested
Because Wi-Fi is a retrospectively synthesized collection of technologies, it is also inevitably a teleological invention. From Nikola Tesla’s ideas about universal wireless communication to Hedy Lamarr’s wartime research, the Wi-Fi narrative encompasses many histories, and projects an inevitable progression towards a connected future. The origin story then reaches considerably further back in time than the lifetime of Wi-Fi itself. It follows that, when we assign agency to key actors in that origin story, we need to remember that, despite some extraordinary instances of technical imagination, Wi-Fi as we now know it was not the objective or intention. For example, as we describe in later chapters, Wi-Fi’s antecedents and constituent elements were, like Tesla and Lamarr’s breakthroughs, not conceived for domestic purposes: their lineages were academic, scientific, and commercial, and their wireless capabilities were responses to problems concerning communication at different spatial scales. The first computer network to use radio communications was ALOHANet, deployed at the University of Hawaii in 1971. ALOHA used UHF signals to connect a university distributed across an oceanic archipelago, linking users across the islands to a central computer. In the late 1980s, NCR researchers in the Netherlands created WaveLAN, a local wireless network designed for communication between cash registers in a retail space. That technology was then adapted in 1993 to build a campus network at Carnegie Mellon University. Radio astronomers at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), an Australian publicly funded research and development body, devised new systems for differentiating radio signals in order to detect gravitational waves from black holes. CSIRO subsequently recognized the potential to apply the same techniques in local wireless networks, and developed a chip incorporating their approach.
Histories of Wi-Fi circulate widely in scholarly texts, popular science, and technology journalism. The stories of where Wi-Fi came from and why it has become so successful diverge along familiar planes of cleavage, producing different protagonists and chronologies. A few examples: in Wired magazine, we find Chris Anderson’s celebrations of Wi-Fi’s ‘revolutionaries’, the great disruptors of telecommunications and internet access (Anderson, 2003). The big story here is not just Wi-Fi, but the whole idea of ‘open spectrum’, a de-privatization of spectrum licensing to allow a comprehensive development of digital radio technologies. Here, the ‘radical pioneers’ are American technology activists, entrepreneurs, ‘bandwidth pirates’, and engineers, but the story also celebrates the role of political and government leaders. In contrast, the community networking field displaces the narrative centre from Silicon Valley to remote communities and dense urban spaces. Alex Hills’s Wi-Fi and the Bad Boys of Radio (2011) is a case in point: the protagonists are not the bad boys (these are the unpredictable radio waves) but technologists with a public vocation. In The Economist, we find another perspective again, a recognition of the institutional and technical complexity of the history, with a strong emphasis on the facilitating role of government. In this context, the decision of the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1985 to allow unlicensed use of the 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz, and 5.8 GHz bands of the radiofrequency spectrum is the vital foundational initiative. The visionary work of FCC engineer Michael Marcus is especially notable.
At the formal level of institutions, history also matters, but it is documented in different ways and in different contexts. Wi-Fi’s key technical components and their lines of descent are carefully registered and adjudicated through the exacting work of IEEE’s standard-setting committees, a key element in the association’s broader formalizing and standardizing role in the technology industries. IEEE’s standard setting is designed to establish grounds of consensus among key industry players to promote interoperability and reliability, and to reduce product development timelines and costs. IEEE decision-making is itself highly structured and closely aligned to World Trade Organization regulations. It produces open standards but not open-source or free-to-use technologies. Notwithstanding the fact that Wi-Fi makes use of unlicensed parts of the spectrum, the IEEE standards include many technical features that do need to be licensed by device manufacturers. The commitment of the participating patent owners is only to license these on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. IEEE standards committee deliberations, decisions, and supporting material are all carefully organized and recorded in considerable detail.
A different kind of retrospective accounting occurs through legal institutions. Conflicting versions of Wi-Fi’s history have been litigated extensively, producing a substantial archive of testimonial and documentary evidence. Many parties now claim to have ‘invented Wi-Fi’ or made other decisive contributions to it. The rich and detailed collection of essays edited by Wolter Lemstra, Vic Hayes, and John Groenewegen (2011) on the ‘innovation journey’ of Wi-Fi concentrates on the development of WaveLAN. The book is authoritative, pluralistic, and wide-ranging, but it makes no mention of the CSIRO research referred to earlier, which has been celebrated in Australia as the ‘invention’ of Wi-Fi. The omission may not be surprising, given that recognition for CSIRO’s contribution – some smart signal processing to address the ‘multipath’ problem (signals bouncing off walls) – was hard-fought and remains contentious. CSIRO received substantial royalties for the patents concerned only after more than a decade of litigation in US East Texas courts. The dispute was framed as a struggle between two entirely different versions of Wi-Fi history. The US tech website Ars Technica covered the settlement of the case in a state of disbelief:
Why is the history of such an invention in dispute? The premier world engineering institution, the IEEE, created a working group for the evolving 802.11 wireless standard in 1990, a full three years before CSIRO filed for its key wireless patent. The group voted repeatedly on which way to go forward and produced heaps of records, but CSIRO didn’t even participate in the 802.11 committee. The group published the first 802.11 standard in 1997 and CSIRO came forward years after the fact. …
A ubiquitous technology that exists because of standards – because of widespread cooperation, essentially – has been re-cast as a story of [a] noble group of hero-inventors, ahead of their time, overcoming the non-believers in court. (Mullin, 2012a)
Ars Technica was particularly concerned by the representation of the CSIRO work in Australia, with the organization listing the Wi-Fi research as its single most important discovery, and the team receiving a number of important prizes and awards. CSIRO’s patent features in A History of Intellectual Property in Fifty Objects (Healy, 2019), a recent survey of significant innovations and their legal destinies. Here Terry Healy presents precisely the narrative of heroic invention which Ars Technica complains about: brilliant researchers pursuing an independent path. Their legal victory, so the story goes, is a victory for ‘research’, and for a small group of outsiders, remembering that the original work was done by radio astronomers, rather than electrical engineers.