current vision is ‘connecting everyone, everything, everywhere’. From hotspots to encryption and set-up systems, the Alliance’s Wi-Fi trademarks cover a remarkable range of applications and uses, as well as the many versions of the main networking protocols. The brands are of two main kinds: those for public use – such as the generic ‘Wi-Fi’ name itself – can be used by anyone to describe or refer to Wi-Fi products. These are licence-free, subject to a small number of requirements and prohibitions, including rules about how the word should be capitalized and hyphenated. Then there are the certification marks, exclusively for the use of Alliance members, intended to function as a ‘seal of approval’ for products guaranteeing interoperability, security, and compliance with relevant protocols. These are subject to strict rules and prohibitions. Meanwhile, the Alliance’s branding strategy has continued to evolve, and the reach of the Wi-Fi brand has continued to expand. For many years it was used alongside the IEEE’s 802.11 alphabet soup of different versions, so products using the Wi-Fi name and logo would also specify compatibility with ‘802.11ac’ or other versions. In 2018, the Alliance began a retrospective rebranding, known as ‘generational Wi-Fi’, requiring the different iterations of Wi-Fi to be rebadged as ‘Wi-Fi 4’, ‘Wi-Fi 5’, and so on. The Alliance’s documentation draws an explicit comparison with the effective marketing of ‘generational’ cellular technologies such as 4G and 5G.
This background underlines the intangible nature of Wi-Fi, but also points to ways in which the Wi-Fi Alliance uses the trademark system to exercise considerable control over the wireless networking ecosystem. While the IEEE’s 802.11 standards are open for licensing, any use of the Wi-Fi name involves an additional layer of control through the Alliance. The Alliance justifies the branding of Wi-Fi on the grounds that it gives consumers confidence and peace of mind regarding the interoperability, safety, and security of networks and devices. It is clearly also a marketing strategy, shaped by a sharp appreciation of the competitive pressures in digital networking.
We can recall here the persistent criticisms from social scientists, cultural critics, and policymakers: brands can be used to raise prices, reduce competition, expand market power, and appropriate common property (see, for example, Coombe, 1998; and the discussion in Lobato and Thomas, 2015, ch. 6). The Wi-Fi brand, and the marketing strategies associated with it, may well be vulnerable to objections along these lines. But in this case the brand also plays an institutional role, mediating between the market and the technical agreements co-ordinated through the IEEE. Further, as a highly successful global tech brand which is not owned by a transnational corporation, the brand also signals Wi-Fi’s double-sided orientations towards both commercial markets and public goods. Those interested can read more than connectedness into the yin-yang symbolism. Despite all that, the success of this brand only goes so far. Wi-Fi’s successful progression from the home into the city streets has been followed by a proliferation of informal Wi-Fi signage, often far more widely used than the licensed logos. In the vernacular, we find Wi-Fi spelt in almost every combination of unauthorized ways, capitalized, lower-case, or unhyphenated. Instead of the stipulated symbol, a generic wireless symbol depicting the radiation of the signal is ubiquitous. The Alliance may have created the name and the logo, but the do-it-yourself ethos of Wi-Fi now extends to its branding.
Figure 1.3 Square at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Source: F1 online digitale Bildagentur GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.
Wi-Fi combines new and old technologies
Wi-Fi is best approached not as a single technology, but as a large and diverse group of technical innovations which have been brought together under a single banner. These function as agreed protocols – rules for critical functions such as encryption, addressing, error correction, channel spacing, and power outputs. These are assembled for an agreed purpose – local wireless networks – which itself is likely to evolve, and they address a changing array of problems. Novel techniques are included, but one of the reasons for Wi-Fi’s low cost is that it combines many pre-existing innovations, some of them already covered by well-known industry standards. So Wi-Fi makes full use of the tricks used by wired ethernet networks for handling data packets. It uses the internet’s underlying protocols for directing data flows, together with ‘spread spectrum’ and ‘frequency hopping’ techniques for sharing radio frequencies, which are also used in other wireless communication systems, such as Bluetooth for short-range devices, and GPS for satellite navigation.
In these respects, Wi-Fi is a good example of Brian Arthur’s observations about the piecemeal, combinatorial aspects of technological evolution (Arthur, 2010). The most significant Wi-Fi innovations involve the assembly of many layers of techniques and practices, the documentation and stabilization of the system through standard-setting, and the integration of this bundle of technologies into hardware and software. Standards and marketing play a major role in market formation, creating economies of scale for further innovation. Companies such as Apple are then well positioned to champion new standards.
The critical achievement for any emergent technology such as Wi-Fi is the overall assembly of new and old techniques, combined with consensus about shared objectives. The next stage is a protracted process of internal and incremental innovation, whereby particular components within the assembly are replaced with marginally improved 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
