I still remember the shock when my father told me he had connected his laptop to the internet without a cable. I'd heard of wireless networking but didn't know it was a standard feature in laptops at the time and all you need is to find a wifi point.
It really was revolutionary. Surprisingly the biggest target market for WiFi ended up being phones, which already have a wireless connection to the Internet.
2003 WiFi was routinely awful, though. Generally unstable, poor compatibility and lousy range. A lot better now, but still could be easier for non-techs.
And the FCC just so happened to approve the spectrum of frequencies that human bodies absorb, turning each Wi-Fi hotspot into surveillance spotlight, and each handheld device into a unique beacon. With everything we know about NSA's influence in other government agencies (like NIST), I think it's entirely reasonable to ask, "why 2.4 GHz?" But I've not seen anyone ask that question here. I'd also wonder whether NRO has satellite capability to measure Wi-Fi signals (and interference from human bodies) from orbit.
> Like other open spectrum technologies rising in its wake, Wi-Fi is a way to use the handful of frequencies set aside for unrestricted consumer use. That's true of the old CB radio, too, but unlike the trucker channels Wi-Fi is digital and smart enough to avoid congestion. After 100 years of regulations that assumed serious wireless technologies were fragile and in need of protection by monopolies on exclusive frequencies (making spectrum the most valuable commodity of the information age), Wi-Fi is fully capable of protecting itself.
It’s true that, unlike other wireless transmission technologies, Wi-Fi allows any company to make a product that can transmit or receive on all frequency bands authorized by a country, whereas for mobile networks, for example, each operator acquires exclusive rights to a frequency band.
That shows that open standards work well and enable healthy competition.
Side note, it's interesting how common it is for tech-savvy people to wire their homes for ethernet (more common now than 10-15 years ago) and how it is still common, or at least not rare, for people reliant on wi-fi to suffer from video streaming issues. The underlying technology keeps getting better, so maybe the improvements will outpace the growth in congestion at some point -- fingers crossed that makers of apps and household appliances don't eat up all future gains and keep us stuck in the same place.
I still find it strange how people use the word “WiFi” to mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet. They have never plugged in an Ethernet cable in their life.
I still get frustrated by WiFi, though, and never use it for my computers unless I had no choice. So many devices these days, the performance is still subpar. Packet loss on the best connections cause so many performance degradations.
> A box the size of a paperback, and costing no more than dinner for two, magically distributes broadband Internet to an area the size of a football field. A card no larger than a matchbook receives it.
An interesting historical document for studying the unit systems used in 2003.
When I moved to the temporary housing that Microsoft provided me in Redmond in 2004, the first thing I did was to buy a laptop. The most memorable access point around me was an open connection with the name "Bring food and beer to B308". I used that person's Internet for a while, and wanted to bring beer to them. Unfortunately, when I surveyed the area, I could find no "Bxxx" blocks in Timberlawn Apartments, only A's. It was probably a neighboring complex. I want to use this opportunity thank that person.
When my parents had a house built in the early 2000s, my father was adamant that Ethernet should be wired to every room. It seemed like a good way to future-proof the building for the 21st century at the time. The year we moved in, tweenage me asked about connecting my Nintendo DS to the internet in order to play Animal Crossing online.
I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going to become so common.
The tone of the article sounds so breathlessly over-excited that it's bordering on self-parody.
The cell phone companies will regret their purchase of 3G spectrum! Those fools, they did not realize their 3G cell towers would soon be rendered obsolete, nay, ridiculous, by my mighty wireless router!
It's not consumers buying consumer electronics, no, it's "an authentic grassroots phenomenon."
My first use of Wi-Fi was for "broadband" internet in very early 2000's. It wasn't that fast, but it was pretty cool. The access point was on a mountain top about 7 miles from my condo. My antenna was a parabolic aluminum grid in my attic. I think the permitted bandwidth was about 400 Kbps. The transceivers were Cisco Aironet 802.11b devices.
That was my main Internet uplink for 5 or more years. About half way through I moved to another house and mounted the antenna outside on the roof for more gain, because the distance increased to about 11 miles. Caught some grief from the HOA, but I kept it up.
A curious artifact of the older days is even to this day a surprising number of devices will caution about the dangers of connecting to an SSID named linksys, even if its WPA3, modern 802.11ax on both AP and client end, etc.
I remember the jump from 802.11b to g was profound. Speed was no longer a luxury. You could browse while torrenting an MP3 file at the same time, wirelessly! It was the golden era of the Internet :)
In 2000 my neighbour built a small network using two Orinoco Gold cards - an ad-hoc[1] network between his laptop (A Sony with a Neomagic chipset, I don't remember the precise model but it was beautiful) and the desktop in his room, and this was
(a) utterly magical
(b) his father was the son of someone very high up in one of the Scottish banks and so this was affordable for him and clearly outside the range of normal people
In 2001 I bought a set of Prism 2 based cards that let me run HostAP (https://hostap.epitest.fi/) and was able to build my own network that didn't rely on ad-hoc mode and so everything was better but the speed at which all of this changed was incredible - we went from infrastructure being out of the reach of normal humans to it being a small reach, and by 2005 we were in the territory of all laptops having it by default. It was an incredible phase shift.
[1] ad hoc was a way for wifi cards to talk to each other without there being an access point, and there was a period where operating systems would show ac-hoc devices as if they were access points, and Windows would remember the last ad-hoc network you'd joined and would advertise that if nothing else was available, and this led to "Free Internet Access" being something that would show up because it was an ad-hoc network someone else advertised and obviously you'd join that and then if you had no internet your laptop would broadcast it and someone else would join it and look the internet was actually genuinely worse in the past please stop assuming everything was better
We tested Wifi-7 in our lab due to planned migrations. It's a huge quality mess right now.
Either MLO doesn't work correctly or the drivers of the Modems (we tested Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, etc.) hit the shitter.
For my private stuff I stick to Wifi-6 and wait until Wifi-8 arrives. Finally having "friendly coordinated handovers" between APs is one of the biggest wins for me.
What they didn't mention in the article and most Wi-Fi historical narrative is the critical contribution from OFDM modulation waveform technology, the idea originated and patented by the radio astronomy research of CSIRO Australia [1],[2].
In the early days of Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 group was still testing spread spectrum and OFDM with 802.11b and 802.11a, respectively. But then it's become apparent that the best bandwidth come from the proper orthogonality of wireless modulation aka OFDM [1].
At the time of the OP article back in 2003 the incumbent cellular mobile modulation of 3G is still spread spectrum based CMDA system but by 4G it's OFDM all-in and the rest is history. CSIRO become much richer due to the patent, and radio astronomy based technology generated some hard cash for the research institute that mainly pursuing science.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 40.8 ms ] thread2003 WiFi was routinely awful, though. Generally unstable, poor compatibility and lousy range. A lot better now, but still could be easier for non-techs.
It’s true that, unlike other wireless transmission technologies, Wi-Fi allows any company to make a product that can transmit or receive on all frequency bands authorized by a country, whereas for mobile networks, for example, each operator acquires exclusive rights to a frequency band.
That shows that open standards work well and enable healthy competition.
I still get frustrated by WiFi, though, and never use it for my computers unless I had no choice. So many devices these days, the performance is still subpar. Packet loss on the best connections cause so many performance degradations.
An interesting historical document for studying the unit systems used in 2003.
I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going to become so common.
The cell phone companies will regret their purchase of 3G spectrum! Those fools, they did not realize their 3G cell towers would soon be rendered obsolete, nay, ridiculous, by my mighty wireless router!
It's not consumers buying consumer electronics, no, it's "an authentic grassroots phenomenon."
That was my main Internet uplink for 5 or more years. About half way through I moved to another house and mounted the antenna outside on the roof for more gain, because the distance increased to about 11 miles. Caught some grief from the HOA, but I kept it up.
(a) utterly magical (b) his father was the son of someone very high up in one of the Scottish banks and so this was affordable for him and clearly outside the range of normal people
In 2001 I bought a set of Prism 2 based cards that let me run HostAP (https://hostap.epitest.fi/) and was able to build my own network that didn't rely on ad-hoc mode and so everything was better but the speed at which all of this changed was incredible - we went from infrastructure being out of the reach of normal humans to it being a small reach, and by 2005 we were in the territory of all laptops having it by default. It was an incredible phase shift.
[1] ad hoc was a way for wifi cards to talk to each other without there being an access point, and there was a period where operating systems would show ac-hoc devices as if they were access points, and Windows would remember the last ad-hoc network you'd joined and would advertise that if nothing else was available, and this led to "Free Internet Access" being something that would show up because it was an ad-hoc network someone else advertised and obviously you'd join that and then if you had no internet your laptop would broadcast it and someone else would join it and look the internet was actually genuinely worse in the past please stop assuming everything was better
Either MLO doesn't work correctly or the drivers of the Modems (we tested Intel, Mediatek, Qualcomm, etc.) hit the shitter.
For my private stuff I stick to Wifi-6 and wait until Wifi-8 arrives. Finally having "friendly coordinated handovers" between APs is one of the biggest wins for me.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhBxWHrG7K8
In the early days of Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11 group was still testing spread spectrum and OFDM with 802.11b and 802.11a, respectively. But then it's become apparent that the best bandwidth come from the proper orthogonality of wireless modulation aka OFDM [1].
At the time of the OP article back in 2003 the incumbent cellular mobile modulation of 3G is still spread spectrum based CMDA system but by 4G it's OFDM all-in and the rest is history. CSIRO become much richer due to the patent, and radio astronomy based technology generated some hard cash for the research institute that mainly pursuing science.
[1] Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_frequency-division_...
[2] How the Aussie government "invented WiFi" and sued its way to $430 million [PDF]:
https://www.vbllaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/How-The-Au...