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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
- Sprache: Englisch
From café culture to home schooling, remote community networks, and smart cities, Wi-Fi is an invisible but fundamental element of contemporary life. Loosely regulated, low-cost, and largely overlooked by researchers, this technology has driven the rise of the smartphone and broadband internet, and is a vital element in the next wave of automation.
Thomas, Wilken, and Rennie provide the first comprehensive account of the social and cultural consequences of Wi-Fi, highlighting the ways in which it has changed our homes, communities, and cities. They discuss its origins as an experimental technology, the conflicts generated around its ownership and control, and the ideas and expectations attached to it by technologists, activists, and entrepreneurs. The authors reveal the ways in which Wi-Fi is an inherently social and political technology, animated by conflicting aspirations for local, public, and community control, and defined by private and corporate interests. As this book shows, Wi-Fi has extended and intensified our online lives while also promising a more inclusive internet.
Wi-Fi is essential reading for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone who wants a better understanding of this ubiquitous and influential technology.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Why Wi-Fi Matters
Why Wi-Fi?
Wi-Fi through past and present
Wi-Fi is a brand
Wi-Fi combines new and old technologies
Wi-Fi’s histories are diverse and contested
Overview of chapters
2 Infrastructure
What is an infrastructure?
Wi-Fi is self-provided
Spectrum as infrastructure
Wi-Fi hardware and its precursors
Wi-Fi standards
Wi-Fi infrastructure and development
Conclusion
3 Home
The domestication of Wi-Fi
Imagination
Appropriation
Objectification
Incorporation
Conversion
The connected home
Conclusion – Wi-Fi and the domestication and transformation of the home
4 Community
Community
Community infrastructure cooperatives
The rise of community networks
Warchalking
Community Wi-Fi as open infrastructure
Community innovation
Community informatics
Mesh networks
The limits of community-based Wi-Fi networks
Community governance and Wi-Fi
Conclusion
5 City
Communication technologies and the city in history
Device portability and the diffusion of city Wi-Fi
Cafés and the social life of Wi-Fi
The politics and economics of city Wi-Fi
The promise of public Wi-Fi for access and equity
Wi-Fi and smart cities
Conclusion
6 Problems, Prospects, Possibilities
Wi-Fi in the short run
Wi-Fi in the long run
Wi-Fi’s social futures?
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, provided by the Australian internet network operator NBN...
Figure 1.2
Internet everywhere: public Wi-Fi, Talinn, Estonia.
Source
: authors...
Figure 1.3
Square at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
Source
: F1 online digitale ...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1
Nikola Tesla holding a gas-filled phosphor-coated wireless light bulb
circa
...
Figure 2.2
ALOHA terminal control unit, 1971.
Source
: Schwartz and Abramson (2009, p...
Figure 2.3
Apple AirPort base station. © Mark Richards.
Source
: The Computer ...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
‘Signal Code of Trampdom’, in the
Kendrick Gazette
(Kendric...
Figure 4.2
Warchalking symbols. Top to bottom: open node, closed node, WEP node, mesh node. ...
Figure 4.3
‘Another view of Cantenna II’.
Source
: Flickr/lungstruck li...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1
Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi (2011).
Source
: Einar Sneve Martinussen,...
Figure 5.2
‘A WiFi network from an 1890s apartment building spilling into the street...
Figure 5.3
Café doors in the Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia, with a sticker promoting Wi...
Guide
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Series Title
Digital Media and Society Series
Nancy Baym,
Personal Connections in the Digital Age
2nd edition
Taina Bucher,
Mercedes Bunz and Graham Meikle,
The Internet of Things
Jean Burgess and Joshua Green,
YouTube
2nd edition
Mark Deuze,
Media Work
Andrew Dubber,
Radio in the Digital Age
Quinn DuPont,
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchains
Charles Ess,
Digital Media Ethics
3rd edition
Jordan Frith,
Smartphones as Locative Media
Alexander Halavais,
Search Engine Society
2nd edition
Martin Hand,
Ubiquitous Photography
Robert Hassan,
The Information Society
Tim Jordan,
Hacking
Graeme Kirkpatrick,
Computer Games and the Social Imaginary
Tama Leaver, Tim Highfield, and Crystal Abidin,
Leah A. Lievrouw,
Alternative and Activist New Media
Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner,
Mobile Communication
Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan,
Digital War Reporting
Dhiraj Murthy,
2nd edition
Zizi A. Papacharissi,
A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age
Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken, and Ellie Rennie,
Wi-Fi
Jill Walker Rettberg,
Blogging
2nd edition
Patrik Wikström,
The Music Industry
3rd edition
Wi-Fi
Julian Thomas,
Rowan Wilken, and
Ellie Rennie
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken, and Ellie Rennie 2021
The right of Julian Thomas, Rowan Wilken, and Ellie Rennie to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2989-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2990-2 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Figures
1.1 A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, provided by the Australian internet network operator NBN during the 2019/20 bushfire season, at an evacuation centre, Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales. Source: NBN Co. Ltd.
1.2 Internet everywhere: public Wi-Fi, Talinn, Estonia. Authors’ image.
1.3 Square at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, France. Source: F1 online digitale Bildagentur GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo.
2.1 Nikola Tesla holding a gas-filled phosphor-coated wireless light bulb circa mid-1896. Source: Tesla Universe.
2.2 ALOHA terminal control unit, 1971. From Schwartz and Abramson (2009, p. 22).
2.3 Apple AirPort base station. © Mark Richards. Source: The Computer History Museum.
4.1 ‘Signal Code of Trampdom’ in the Kendrick Gazette (Kendrick, Idaho), 4 June 1909.
4.2 Warchalking symbols. Source: Wikimedia Commons
4.3 ‘Another view of Cantenna II’. Source: Flickr/lungstruck licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0.
5.1 Immaterials: Light Painting WiFi (2011). Source: Einar Sneve Martinussen, Jørn Knutsen, and Timo Arnall, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
5.2 ‘A WiFi network from an 1890s apartment building spilling into the street’ (Martinussen, 2011).
5.3 Café doors in the Old Town, Tallinn, Estonia, with a sticker promoting Wi-Fi availability. Authors’ image.
Acknowledgements
Many people have contributed to our work on this book, and to the research projects and writings that have led to it. We would like to thank all our colleagues in RMIT’s Technology, Communication and Policy Lab, and in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre. Warm thanks especially to Hannah Withers, who worked with us on this project in both its formative and concluding stages. We would also like to thank RMIT for the University’s generous support for our work throughout. Thanks also to Daniel Sacchero (Easyweb Digital) and Jenny McFarland (CAYLUS) for interviews with Ellie Rennie on Wi-Fi in remote Aboriginal communities (Chapter 4).
At Polity, we wish to thank Mary Savigar and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer for their enthusiastic support of this project, their patience, and their assistance in seeing this book through to publication.
Closer to home, Julian would like to thank Jeannine Jacobson and Sam Thomas for their patience, especially when the Wi-Fi was down; Rowan would like to give a big thanks to Karen, Laz, Max, and Sunday, for their love, support, and encouragement; and Ellie would like to thank Jason Potts for giving her lots of experience with Wi-Fi troubleshooting over the years (earning her the badge for SuperTechSupport at home).
Finally, thanks to all the first pets for being excellent passwords over the years.
Julian Thomas
Rowan Wilken
Ellie Rennie
1Why Wi-Fi Matters
When catastrophe strikes, we see communication in new ways. January 2020 was high summer in the southern hemisphere. Holiday makers, together with their smartphones, flocked to the beaches and camping grounds of the Australian coast. But, after years of drought and record high temperatures linked to global warming, the forests were on fire. Hot days, dry air, parched bush, and gusty winds created the conditions for huge, fast-moving fires. Ancient rainforests which had never experienced fire were lost. The fires isolated and burned through small townships. They left thousands of people homeless and stranded. With roads blocked by fire and fallen trees, people were trapped in small coastal communities for many days. There they managed as best they could, sheltering on beaches, making do in tents, sheds, and caravans.
Months later, when eventually the fires were controlled or extinguished by rain, the damage to people, wildlife, and the environment was immense: 186,000 square kilometres were burnt and 5,900 buildings were lost. Thirty-four people died, and an estimated 3 billion animals were killed or displaced. As well as burning bush and buildings, the fire ravaged the essential infrastructure people rely on: power lines, water supplies, roads, and communications. The fire destroyed cellular phone towers and landlines. Fixed and mobile broadband services failed, leaving homes, visitors, and businesses without internet. Destruction led to disconnection. Electronic payment systems and cash machines could not be used; health records could not be accessed.
A crisis of this kind reveals not only the central importance of modern communication networks for our safety, security, and economic and social connections, but also their fragility. It uncovers both remarkable adaptive capabilities and fundamental weaknesses. The gaps appear between our settled expectations of communication and the unpredictability of events. In the immediate aftermath of the fires, reconnection to communication was a critical priority. Stop-gap solutions depended on what was damaged and what resources could be readily used. If cell-phone towers or exchanges were undamaged but power supplies were destroyed, back-up power could be provided, sometimes with the help of the fire services. Where cellular networks were available, telecommunications companies could increase data allowances or make other concessions to users. If public phone booths were functioning, they could be reconfigured as public Wi-Fi base stations. Wireless communication networks could stand in for burnt-out fixed lines. Australia’s national broadband network offered access to its satellite internet service through trucks which combined a mobile satellite connection, Wi-Fi base stations, laptops, and charging points for mobile devices.
As we finished this book, some months after the fires, a number of these mobile connection units were still in place in small towns across the fireground, parked in public spaces, reserves, and camping grounds. They continued to provide essential communications while the arduous and protracted business of recovery and rebuilding proceeded.
Events also moved on: by March 2020, and only barely after the worst of the fires in Australia, a new catastrophe engulfed us, of a kind few expected. In the space of just a year, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken over 2 million lives. In order to control the spread of the virus, governments around the world froze their economies. They closed borders, schools, universities, and businesses. Millions of people lost their jobs. Those who could work from home were required or impelled to do so. For those families that were connected, parents began supervising their children’s online lessons, juggling school with the imperatives of work. For households without internet, the difficulties were multiplied. According to UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (2020), around a third of the world’s school children were without access to remote learning, making it impossible for them to continue their education.
Figure 1.1 A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, provided by the Australian internet network operator NBN during the 2019/20 bushfire season, at an evacuation centre, Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales. The truck offers free Wi-Fi and device charging. It connects to the internet through NBN’s satellite service. Source: NBN Co. Ltd.
For us, the authors of this book, and for many others, the pandemic abruptly suspended mobile working lives, the everyday cycles of work at the office and periodic travel for meetings, research, and conferences. Working at home was always a necessary part of that cycle; now, for those fortunate enough to keep their jobs or find new ones, working space and domestic space entirely converged. New physical and functional segmentations of the home were required to make work and study spaces for everyone, from the kitchen table to the corners of rooms and corridors intended for other things. Home Wi-Fi assumed a critical role, as we rapidly came to rely on it for maintaining the simultaneous multiplicity of education, family, and social connections, as well as the everyday tasks of teaching, research, and professional communication.
The pandemic created a new ‘landscape of risk’ (Robinson et al., 2020; Zinn and McDonald, 2018). For those connected people able to work and shelter at home, Wi-Fi made possible a domestic bubble, a safer space offering shelter while the pandemic progressed. These people were the best placed to sustain their health and welfare during the pandemic. They could carry on without greatly exposing themselves to the risk of infection. Outside the bubble, the experiences of those without affordable communications and the skills to use them were very different. Just as the role of private Wi-Fi suddenly expanded in the home, so access to public Wi-Fi receded just as quickly. Libraries, schools, and universities closed. Cafés where students once lingered over their laptops were reduced to serving coffee to go. Many people avoided public transport if possible. Low-income families with school age children, homeless and vulnerable people, were all suddenly more socially and economically isolated by virtue of their digital disconnection. Soon after cities began to shut down, reports appeared of people working from their cars in library parking lots, attempting to use the Wi-Fi from outside.
Why Wi-Fi?
The short-range wireless networking capabilities we commonly call Wi-Fi first became part of everyday digital experience (and everyday digital folklore) two decades prior to the pandemic, when then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously showed off his company’s new notebook computer, the iBook. The iBook of 1999 was a colourful, translucently plastic device. As a millennial design object, it broke with the blocky, grey, corporate-looking laptops of the time. The iBook invited us to see through its translucent case into the machine’s internals, and its organic form and integrated handle suggested an easy portability. The built-in Wi-Fi promised a seamlessly connected future, signalling the end of the era when communication was constrained by the messy physicality of cables, plugs, and sockets.
The iBook was new, but it popularized a technology that had been in development for well over a decade, building on ideas and applications with a considerably longer history. We discuss some of these below and in the chapters that follow. From today’s vantage point, Wi-Fi is no longer an emerging technology, but it is an extraordinarily successful one, now deeply embedded in everyday social and economic life. It has successively moved beyond the laptop into phones, games consoles, music players, televisions, and a suite of ‘smart home’ devices, from speakers to security cameras.
Like television, Wi-Fi has changed public and private spaces, from households to cafés, hospitals, and libraries. It has changed the way people work, travel, and entertain themselves, enabling the creation of new markets, new spin-off technologies, and new cultural practices. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry certifying body which controls the Wi-Fi trademark, estimates that, as of 2020, over 13 billion Wi-Fi devices are in use, and that 4 billion Wi-Fi devices were shipped in 2019 (Wi-Fi Alliance, 2020b). So, in the space of a few decades, the global population of Wi-Fi devices has grown to comfortably exceed the number of humans. The Alliance claims that Wi-Fi is the single most-used medium for global internet traffic, and contributes substantially to the world’s 3 trillion dollar mobile internet economy (2020b). One database of publicly accessible open access networks reports that there are now over 40 million free Wi-Fi hotspots globally, with almost half a million of these descendants of the public phone booth in Indonesia alone (Wiman, 2020). Growth at the global scale has also been spectacular at a domestic level. According to one market analysis, broadband-connected households in the United States in 2018 had an average of 9.1 Wi-Fi connected devices (Parks Associates, 2018).
Wi-Fi indeed seems to be everywhere, as those big numbers suggest. But if wireless broadband once appeared magical, there is a risk that for many of us it may now seem mundane. Wi-Fi predated the take-up of 3G mobile networks in the first decade of the new millennium: it offered the first accessible form of mobile broadband. Most people’s computing experiences are now both mobile and connected. We are familiar with both the convenience of Wi-Fi and its irritations: the glitchy slow-downs, the password problems, the scams, the patchy coverage, the surveillance, the highly restricted public networks, and the consequences of constant connection for work and social life. Cellular wireless services are now often faster – and sometimes much faster – than Wi-Fi. In many ways, Wi-Fi has both exceeded the expectations of its early advocates and disappointed them.
Figure 1.2 Internet everywhere: public Wi-Fi, Talinn, Estonia. Source: authors’ own.
Wi-Fi’s fundamental capability is that it enables shared, flexible, and relatively low-cost access to the internet, a valuable resource. This gives rise to a set of distinctive attributes, and these are at the heart of both the extraordinary successes of Wi-Fi and its failures. As we describe, Wi-Fi is an unusual form of network infrastructure, which augments and sometimes substitutes for other networks, while proving resistant to the power of both internet platforms and large service providers. In households, communities, and cities, Wi-Fi can work as a gap filler and a network extender. It does not rely on cutting-edge technologies or high-end processors, and Wi-Fi chips are produced in huge numbers, so the hardware is cheap. Its transmissions use the shared, publicly available spectrum, so users do not bear the costs of exclusive commercial spectrum licences. It is usually deployed on the edges of communication networks, within households and public spaces, by both end users and internet access companies. In telecommunications-speak, Wi-Fi is a ‘last mile’ technology, which can be provided, managed, and adapted by internet users themselves, whether these are families, institutions, or local communities. By the same token, the deployment of Wi-Fi doesn’t directly change underlying network infrastructures, such as the distribution or ownership of high-speed cables and switches. Nor does it change market structures, policies, or pricing models which substantially determine where and how people can connect. This means that Wi-Fi on its own is unlikely to bridge the digital divide or equalize the social distribution of digital resources. Despite the hopes of some its early advocates, Wi-Fi has not displaced commercial mobile networks. Nor has it created an open, internet commons.
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 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 meant, the Wi-Fi Alliance can decide what Wi-Fi means in any given context. The Alliance’s 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.
