If you’re of the older generation, the days of wired internet probably don’t feel like all that long ago. Gamers might remember the days of the LAN party and corporate workers might well remember the days of logging in via telephone and a modem.

And, prior to the widescale adoption of ADSL, more than a few people probably remember the epic sibling battles that would occur over using the telephone line for actual telephone calls instead of using it to download music from Napster.

While all of these situations were a step toward our connected world, there was one technology that really helped unlock it and bring it to the masses. While this Australian invention would start small, today you’ll find it the world over, including on aeroplanes and even being broadcast from space. In this What the Tech?!, we’re exploring the development and mass adoption of Wi-Fi.

Concept & Development

If the concept of a receiver and transmitter sharing digital data doesn’t really seem all that high-tech today, you’re actually right, because the concept is pretty old, contextually speaking. In fact, traditional radio stations would operate similarly, albeit using analogue transmissions instead of digital.

Eventually, research would shift away from using voice or continuous wave transmission to focus on developing and using digital data formats to share information. While many countries had their own research programs focusing on this issue, it was the Australian-based CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation) that played a large role in the development and widescale adoption of this tech.


Dr John O’Sullivan played a key role in the development of the new tech. Source: Wikipedia.
Researcher Dr John O’Sullivan led a team of researchers who were responsible for producing a paper that dealt with the issue of multipath interference. Much of this research would be used in the early development of Wi-Fi protocols and due to the importance of the research the CSIRO would eventually end up earning billions of dollars as royalties.

Modems would eventually be replaced with more modern technology. Source: Wikipedia

It might surprise you to learn though that much of this research was carried out quite early, with the early 1990's being the peak research period for the project. For most Australians at the time, the internet speed was an incredibly slow 56kbps, which was achieved via a Modem and a telephone line, so it was pretty groundbreaking research all things considered. Still, it would take a considerable length of time before this technology would be available to consumers worldwide.

Mass Adoption

While the modem was useful for helping bring the internet a step closer to mass adoption, the reality was that in comparison to the Western world Australia faced quite a unique problem in getting connected. The tyranny of distance and the sheer size of the country meant that putting the entire country online would be a complex and expensive operation.

Technology like the new Wi-Fi protocol could help reduce the expense faced in doing this and more importantly, could help provide a far greater connection speed than would be possible by simply using copper lines the way that current methods did. It would also save money on expensive Fibre Optic cables, as Wi-Fi could be used inside a building once Fibre Optics had brought the connection close to the building.

It’s worth mentioning here that while radio-based point-to-point links did exist to help mitigate the effects of distance, connections across the continent would favour hardwiring where possible, due to reliability. While the new technology wouldn’t be used to help connect the states, what it would do was favour commercial and corporate environments where many users in one place had devices that would need online access.

This one feature alone would help turbocharger Wi-Fi adoption as it was perfect for use in hospitals, shopping centres, government buildings and even airports and aircraft. While early 3g networks weren’t anything to write home about, the later 4g and 5g connections were capable of rapid and efficient data transfers both ways.

Most modern airlines now feature inflight Wi-Fi. Source: Twitter

Still, the new technology was reasonably slow to be adopted, and it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that Wi-Fi technology would start to enter the general public's awareness. Being adopted by tech fans and hobbyists first, it would eventually become more common in the mainstream, being used in the corporate world, before then being adopted in homes and offices the world over.

Security & Vulnerabilities

While the new protocol would end up being pretty convenient, it wasn’t without its issues. Early Wi-Fi would suffer from the issue of both being exploitable AND having a pretty poor security configuration in its default setting.

The early Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) that was used had relatively weak encryption standards and was able to be exploited by various means. Tools like Aircrack-ng that we see in use today were originally designed to help exploit these insecure protocols for both research and malicious means, and later protocols that were released would aim to address these vulnerabilities, making it harder for bad actors to exploit them.

One issue that remained a problem for far longer than it should have been was the issue of insecure configurations. While it’s been rectified to some extent over the past few years, for too long manufacturers would apply default passwords to their devices and the end user simply wouldn’t bother to update them. This would lead to routers being exploited remotely where they would subsequently be used for everything from cryptocurrency mining through to nodes in a botnet.

Eventually, the manufacturers would deal with this issue by providing a stronger default configuration that usually included a decent administrator password.

Future Development

As the radio spectrum has become vital to our connected world, we see far more usage of it in everyday circumstances. Not only do mobile devices need this to run but the explosion of the Internet of Things means that the number of devices using the Industrial Scientific & Medical (ISM) bands has increased as well.

And, while the protocol is still young in comparison to other forms of technology when you look at how things were just 10 years ago, some might say we are living in the future today.

This is because rapid adoption and ongoing development have led to a world where you can find a Wi-Fi connection almost anywhere. Consumers use their devices cruising on international airliners at 38,000ft, oil & gas workers access the internet many miles offshore and the evolution of technology like the Starlink cluster has meant that for the right price, you can access the internet almost anywhere on the planet. This is a remarkable feat considering the radio transmitter was quite a modern invention.

Improvements in spread spectrum transmitting along with more efficient transmitting protocols and weak signal processing methods mean that the development of Wi-Fi is anything but done. The most modern versions are capable of theoretical speeds of up to 30gpbs and feature more efficient spectrum usage, better latency and improved capacity. In English, this effectively means that your future connection will be faster while being able to serve more users concurrently.

Wireless, Where?!

It’s pretty easy to say “the world over” but harder to grasp exactly what this means without some context. So, to finish off the article we compiled a few places where you’ll find a Wi-Fi connection like no other to help people stay connected to the outside world.

1. In Orbit: The International Space Station
2. The Desert: Atacama Desert, Chile
3. At Sea: Pitcairn Islands, Pitcairn
4. Underground: Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado

What The Tech is our recurring, twice-monthly piece that looks at the technology that was essential in shaping our modern world.

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