Wireless networks are ubiquitous in modern life. Wi-Fi technology is in our smartphones, laptops, and even our watches. The Internet is available in nearly every home across the country. Wi-Fi is one of the great revolutions in computing in the past few decades.
You might be surprised that Australia proudly claims to have invented Wi-Fi – a claim that makes sense, as the developers of the technology should get a fair share of the benefits – but dig deeper and you’ll find that things are a lot more complicated than that.
Big Idea
It all started with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), a government agency with a broad mandate to pursue research goals across many disciplines, which in the 1990s expanded to include research into a range of radio technologies, including wireless networking.
The CSIRO is extremely proud of their achievement, calling it “the team that brought WiFi to the world.” It’s a bit of trivia, often told as a bit of national pride, but it turns out that Australian scientists were behind one of the biggest technological inventions of recent times.
For anyone who’s done any research into Wi-Fi history, this might sound a bit confusing. Wasn’t it the IEEE that founded the 802.11 working group? And wasn’t that standard released to the public in 1997? Yes!
In fact, many groups worked on wireless networking technologies in the 1980s and 1990s. Notably, CSIRO was among them, but it was by no means the first, and was not involved in the group behind 802.11. Although that group was formed in 1990, the precursor to 802.11 was actually developed in 1991 in a Dutch laboratory by NCR Corporation/AT&T. The first standard that would later become Wi-Fi, 802.11-1997, was established by the IEEE based on a proposal by Lucent and NTT, and had a bit rate of just 2 MBit/s and an operating frequency of 2.4GHz. The standard worked based on frequency hopping or direct sequence spread spectrum technology. This later evolved into the popular 802.11b standard in 1999, which increased the speed to 11 Mbit/s. 802.11a came later, switching to 5GHz and using a modulation scheme based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM).
It seems we know who invented Wi-Fi, but why is an Australian claiming the credit? In the end, it’s all about patents. A team from CSIRO has been independently developing wireless network technology for a long time. In fact, the group applied for a patent on November 19, 1993, entitled “Invention: Wireless LAN.” At the heart of this patent was the idea of using multi-carrier modulation to avoid the pesky problem of multipath interference in indoor environments. A US patent was subsequently obtained along the same lines in 1996.
These patents were filed because the CSIRO team thought they had cracked wireless networking at speeds of several megabits per second. But the details are quite different from modern networking technologies in use today. Reading the patent, you’ll repeatedly see statements like “operating at frequencies above 10 GHz.” In fact, diagrams in the patent documents refer to transmissions in the 60-61 GHz range, which is quite different from the mainstream Wi-Fi standard established by the IEEE. CSIRO spent years looking for a commercial partner to help establish this technology, but with little success, except for a short-lived startup called Radiata, which was absorbed by Cisco and never seen again.
When Steve Jobs wowed crowds in 1999 by demonstrating the first mainstream laptop with wireless networking, interestingly, CSIRO wasn’t mentioned.
The fact that CSIRO is not part of the 802.11 working group and that its patents do not address the frequencies or specific technologies used by Wi-Fi might lead you to believe that CSIRO has no right to claim to have invented Wi-Fi. But a look at the agency’s website might give you that exact impression. So what’s going on?
CSIRO was working on wireless LAN technology at the same time as all the other agencies. In general, it was unable to directly commercialize the technologies it developed. However, the agency still held patents. So in the 2000s, it claimed that it effectively owned the rights to the technologies developed for effective wireless networks, which are used in the Wi-Fi standard. It sent letters to several companies demanding payment, but never got enough. CSIRO began suing wireless network companies, accusing various companies of infringing its patents and demanding high royalties, up to $4 per device in some cases. CSIRO claimed that its scientists had invented the unique combination of OFDM multiplexing, forward error correction, and interleaving that was key to making wireless networks practical.
The first test case, against a Japanese company called Buffalo Technology, ended in a victory for CSIRO. A follow-up case in 2009 involved a group of 14 companies. After four days of testimony, the case was supposed to go to a jury for decision, but many of the jurors are not particularly well educated on the finer points of wireless communications. Instead, the matter was settled for $205 million in favor of CSIRO. In 2012, the Australian group again faced off against a group of nine companies, including T-Mobile, AT&T, Lenovo, and Broadcom. The case ended with a further settlement of $229 million paid to CSIRO.
We know very little about what happened in these cases, or what negotiations took place. Records of the brief case, which concluded in 2009, show defense lawyers pointing out that the modulation techniques used in the Wi-Fi standard had existed for decades before CSIRO later patented wireless LAN. CSIRO, on the other hand, continued to argue that it was a combination of technologies that made wireless LAN possible, and that it should receive fair compensation for the use of its patented technology.
Did it work? Well, to an extent, that’s what patents are for. If you patent an idea and it’s deemed unique and special, you can generally charge a fee to others who want to use it. For better or worse, CSIRO was granted a US patent for a combination of technologies that enabled wireless networks. Other companies may have reached similar conclusions on their own, but their failure to obtain a patent left them open to very expensive lawsuits from CSIRO.
But there is a big caveat here. This is because CSIRO He invented Wi-Fi. More recently, the agency has been careful with its wording, saying on its website that it “invented wireless LAN.”
It is certainly true that CSIRO scientists invented wireless networking technology. The problem is that in the mass media, this is often rephrased as the agency inventing Wi-Fi, which obviously isn’t the case. Of course, this misconception doesn’t hurt the agency’s reputation one bit.
CSIRO eventually applied for several patents. One He invented wireless networking technology in the 1990s. But did he invent Wi-Fi? Of course not. And many would argue that this patent shouldn’t allow him to profit from equipment built to a standard he had no role in developing. Still, the myth is likely to persist for a while, at least until someone writes a New York Times bestseller about the true and accurate history of the real Wi-Fi standard. I can’t wait.
