The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)

The Wi-Fi Revolution (2003)(wired.com)

95 points by Cieplak 263 days ago | 93 comments

sedatk 258 days ago |

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.

bjornsing 257 days ago | |

I ran a small ISP around the same time that used this behavioral pattern to bring down the customer acquisition cost to near zero. Essentially we sold ADSL connections with Wi-Fi and a second SSID where anybody could connect and sign up for internet access. If too may signed up we sent out personal offers for ADSL service to some of them and wired up their homes too. Fun project, but stressful and not very profitable.

cortesoft 258 days ago |

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.

oskarkk 258 days ago | |

> I still find it strange how people use the word “WiFi” to mean internet. For so many young people today, WiFi IS the internet.

I don't think that's the case, people don't call mobile internet "WiFi". In their minds "WiFi" probably means "home internet", so it's more like they call LAN "WiFi", because they have never used cable connection.

sekh60 258 days ago | | |

I have a friend who, no matter how many times I have explained it, calls her Internet connection WiFi. I was really confused at first when she said she pays for Wi-Fi. She's 27.

zenoprax 258 days ago | | |

I think if you're not "on Wifi" then you're "on data" (or perhaps "on 5G" if it's a social status thing). If one were to connect via Starlink then it would still be correct to say you were on Wifi I think but if you could hook up ethernet directly... I think most of us would say you're now "on satellite"?

I didn't even consider that the newest iPhones can connect to satellites directly.

cortesoft 258 days ago | | |

Yeah, that’s true. I even thought about that when I was typing my comment but wasn’t sure the best way to articulate the difference, but I think you are right with it being about home internet vs cellular.

Although I really think it is just used to mean “non-phone based internet”, rather than just home internet.

1718627440 255 days ago | | |

I used to hate the term mobile data, before I got to know, that this is the official term, because no you can't take the internet with you.

supertrope 258 days ago | |

Please make sure to throw away your Kleenex before stepping onto the Escalator.

nytesky 258 days ago | | |

I don’t think people realize tha Wi-Fi is a brand name for 'IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence'." WiFi, Wifi, or wifi, are not approved by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Despite common belief the name Wi-Fi is not short-form for 'Wireless Fidelity'.

ezoe 257 days ago | |

In my country, GIGA means "data transfer quota", USB means "USB storage"

qingcharles 258 days ago |

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.

teleforce 257 days ago |

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.

[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...

andrepd 257 days ago | |

Just one more example of how investment in fundamental science, without explicit reference to marketability or industry applications, often produce revolutionary technology which does have economic applications.

Waraqa 258 days ago |

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.

xzjis 258 days ago |

> 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.

chihuahua 258 days ago |

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."

20after4 257 days ago | |

It seems to me that, for the most part, it was warranted enthusiasm. Wi-Fi has lived up to most of the wildest predictions and probably achieved even greater adoption than anyone could have imagined back in the early days.

chihuahua 256 days ago | | |

That's certainly true; Wi-Fi is a useful and almost indispensable product. I just don't think it's a revolution in which the virtuous consumers wrest control from the evil overloads of Big Spectrum.

I was using computers before Wi-Fi and eventually bought a Wi-Fi router for use at home, so it's not that I've never experienced world without Wi-Fi.

dualogy 257 days ago | |

> The tone of the article sounds so breathlessly over-excited that it's bordering on self-parody.

Welcome to every Wired article ever, certainly from its inception well into the mid-2000s at least.

Today it's at best amusing, but those were times just 1-1.5 generations ago when that was truly, genuinely generally enjoyed (by techies & youngsters) as neither Tired nor Expired but (Hot)Wired, and as a needed/welcome breath of air in an ocean of seemingly-immutable last-century whiffs & echoes =)

Waraqa 258 days ago |

https://archive.is/8tLce

danbolt 258 days ago |

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.

zer00eyz 258 days ago | |

> I wonder if we would have done the Ethernet again if he knew that Wi-Fi was going to become so common.

Today, if your wiring up a house you put ethernet drops everywhere.

POE is a thing, and it's getting more popular.

Cameras, blinds, MM wave... It's almost to the point where one should be putting a media box in every closet as a mini wiring hookup.

humanfromearth9 256 days ago | | |

Close to the floor as well as close to the ceiling.

kjellsbells 258 days ago | |

Even with wifi, big houses or tough RF environments need mesh units to get ubiquitous wifi coverage. And there, ethernet wired backhaul is far, far superior to wireless. So maybe your dad was prescient in a different way.

The issue with wiring your house for Ethernet is that 2003-era Cat5 that a random builder or DIYer grabs from Home Depot isn't going to carry nearly as much as the Cat6A cable you would want if you need the cable plant to have a chance of keeping up with network capacity growth. But that needs quality installation.

ghaff 257 days ago | | |

I had a fairly extensive Ethernet and audio speaker setup in the course of a couple of house renovations. Much of that is trashed from smoke mitigation after a kitchen fire. Will pretty much just use WiFi from here on out.

j45 257 days ago | |

Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such as set top box devices, etc.

The issue wasn't whether wifi was going to become so common, it was the guaranteed improvement in reliability and speed of wifi.

Anyone could use ethernet, and still can.

xandrius 257 days ago | |

I would still do this in 2025, just with different category of ethernet cable, that's it.

j45 257 days ago | |

Ethernet in each room remains valuable for other reasons, such as set top box devices, etc.

NoiseBert69 257 days ago |

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.

ksec 257 days ago | |

In case this still isn't common knowledge. You should always use WiFi 7 hardware as the latest WiFi 6E solution. I.e Latest Generation of WiFi is the best version of last generation.

Just like when WiFi 6 came out, OFDMA didn't work well or wasn't even turned on by default. The same thing happened with WiFi 5 MU-MIMO, and WiFi 7 MLO. Expect the MLO to only work with WiFi 8.

And for all the latency reduction and reliability upgrade with WiFi 8? The expect them to work well in WiFi 9.

izacus 257 days ago | |

Wifi 7 without MLO works just fine and quickly though.

Synaesthesia 258 days ago |

Remember the Steve Jobs presentation where he put an iBook through a hula hoop to prove there are no cables? Classic

GuB-42 258 days ago |

> 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.

dkarl 258 days ago |

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.

topspin 258 days ago |

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.

davisr 258 days ago |

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.

throw0101d 257 days ago |

The Serial Port put up a video saying that Apple really helped push Wifi into the mainstream with the AirPort:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhBxWHrG7K8

miladyincontrol 258 days ago |

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.

mjg59 257 days ago |

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

1970-01-01 258 days ago |

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 :)