19 Nov /18

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi – Word of the day – EVS Translations
Wi-Fi – Word of the day – EVS Translations

There are many things in life that we fail to appreciate until we are forced to live without them – things like love, money, or a good Wi-Fi connection. All joking aside, none of us nostalgically look back to a time when we were forcibly tethered to an Internet connection or having to wait for a website/photo/video to load over the dreaded roaming 3G connection. In fact, we have come to rely on Wi-Fi so much that it’s typically one of the first amenities that we look for if we are going to be in a certain place for an extended period of time. We know it is important and we know that we need it, but what about the term itself?

Technically defined as any of number of standards created to transfer data wirelessly at a high speed over a short distance, the concept of Wi-Fi is surprisingly more straightforward than the term. According to Phil Belanger, founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, the term was created by brand consulting firm Interbrand solely as a play on the shortened form of the audio term “high fidelity”, hi-fi. The first recorded usage of our term occurred on September 15, 1999, when Business Wire published a press release stating that: “The Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance..unveiled Wi-Fi, the new consumer brand identity for the IEEE 802.11 High Rate (HR) Standard.” Still though, it’s worth noting that the only truly acceptable form of the term is Wi-Fi, even if we do tend to also write ‘WiFi’ or ‘wifi’ without thinking about it.

Interestingly, though the term originates in the late 1990s, virtually all aspects of what we consider to be “Wi-Fi” predate the term. For example, the first public demonstration of a wireless data packet network happened in June of 1971 on a system developed by the University of Hawaii, ALOHAnet. The releasing/allocation of the wireless frequencies which would carry Wi-Fi signals was initiated by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1985. Finally, much of the technology which makes Wi-Fi work (reducing multipath interference of radio signals transmitted for computer networking) was patented in 1996 by an Australian radio-astronomer while his CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) team was attempting to “detect exploding mini black holes the size of an atomic particle”.

While we may not consider the issue now, the majority of the different technologies that had developed over the previous decades weren’t made to work seamlessly with one another; moreover, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had no authority to test compliance with its standards. Seeing the potential issues this could cause in the future, upon the development and branding of a faster wireless technology in 1999 (Wi-Fi), key industry players formed the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, which would later become the Wi-Fi Alliance. In the nearly 20 years since then, the Wi-Fi Alliance has grown to include over 550 companies, 40,000 different wireless products, and a global economic value of nearly EUR 1.8 trillion.