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 best’ on Apple’s machines. As other firms began to build those same capabilities into many other computers and base stations, the AirPort name inevitably became one of many used to market wireless networking gear. What became known as Wi-Fi was generally designated as ‘802.11’, the number given to the relevant family of wireless standards developed for local networks within the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, known as the IEEE.
For those manufacturers and developers keen to promote the new standards, several issues were quickly apparent. Jobs emphasized the fact that AirPort used the new industry standard, and therefore would work with a whole array of devices soon to appear. But the 802.11 standards were complex and wide-ranging, with the result that not all compliant devices using the same standard were assured to work together, and the IEEE’s role in specifying the agreed standard did not extend to testing devices for compliance. Further, 802.11 was, as we have noted, a family of standards, with each iteration given a specific alphabetic suffix. The standard used in Apple’s 1999 iBook and other early consumer systems was 802.11b, to be followed in time by 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac, and many others. These different versions of Wi-Fi all involved significant improvements, but the nomenclature was difficult to follow or comprehend for those without specialist knowledge.
A new trade organization emerged, the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, to promote the new wireless networking and certify that devices would work together. For this purpose, a new name was required. Interbrand, a transnational marketing consultancy with previous successes including Prozac and oneworld, was commissioned. Interbrand conceived the ‘Wi-Fi’ name, together with a logo that borrowed (or appropriated) familiar yin-yang symbolism. The point was plainly to synthesize a brand, something that could be registered, licensed, and controlled through trademark law. The alliance itself became the ‘Wi-Fi Alliance’. The name ‘Wi-Fi’ was coined in part because it could be readily trademarked – no-one else used it, nor could it be confused with anything else. It was an entirely arbitrary name which meant nothing. The word did play with ‘Hi-Fi’, an abbreviation for ‘high fidelity’ with a certain retro cachet from the world of consumer audio. However, the evidence is that the Wi-Fi name was not intended to signify ‘wireless fidelity’, or be an abbreviation for anything. The Alliance nevertheless confused the issue by adopting for a time the slogan ‘the standard for wireless fidelity’ – a formula that was developed after the name had been chosen, and meant very little. It was noted that no-one knew what wireless fidelity was, and the Alliance was not a standard-setting body (Doctorow, 2005).
The Wi-Fi Alliance currently controls around fifty Wi-Fi-related brands (Wi-Fi Alliance, 2020a). While the trademarked name plays a critical role in stabilizing a complex and evolving group of technologies, it is also surprisingly multivalent itself. Just as Humpty Dumpty once reserved for himself the right to decide what a word
