Who Invented Wi-Fi?

We benefit from it every day for working, creating, streaming, communicating and more. But where did this magical invisible data transfer technology come from?

There really is no one single inventor of Wi-Fi from conception to what Wi-Fi is today, rather a series of people who invented advancements in radio frequency manipulation over many decades that contributed to it.

For one of the few key moments in the history of Wi-Fi, one of the first places to look is Hollywood.

The Seeds of Wi-Fi

Let’s talk about Hedy Lamarr – it is often said she is the ‘mother’ of Wi-Fi.

However, while Wi-Fi might not be what it is today without her, it’s more accurate to say her invention planted the seeds of what would become Wi-Fi.

Lamarr’s better-known claim to fame was as a Hollywood actress in the 1940s, however in what we would call today a ‘side hustle’, she was a keen scientist and inventor, utilising mostly self-taught techniques in science and technology to experiment.

When reading about the US Navy’s challenges with the enemy being able to jam the guidance systems of torpedoes, effectively knocking them off course, Hedy and her friend, the composer/pianist George Antheil, explored the concept of ‘frequency hopping’, a way of keeping a signal’s ‘target’ moving so enemy interference had a hard time tracking it.

Although frequency hopping wasn’t new (earlier work with it dates back as far as 1899), its application in this setting was. And although Lamarr’s and Antheil’s work on the original incarnation of frequency hopping doesn’t have a direct lineage to Wi-Fi, variations on the concept certainly do.

The Evolution of Wi-Fi – What Happened In Between

Between the Lamarr/Antheil years and the 1990s, Wi-Fi as a concept remained largely in the background within scientific and electrical engineering communities, away from the commercial consumer sphere.

But even from the 1970s, significant moves were made that would eventually make commercially-usable (and personally) Wi-Fi a reality: from a UHF ‘Packet Data Network’— wirelessly transmitting a message by breaking it into smaller transmissible parts—for communicating data between the islands of Hawaii, to the work of electrical engineer Vic Hayes, who worked at what was then a computing company in NCR Corp (first on the market with commercial barcode scanners).

Vic Hayes and the Modern Birth of Wi-Fi

Fast forward some years to 1997, and it was Indonesian-born, Netherlands-educated Hayes who established and chaired the ‘IEEE 802.11 Standards Working Group for Local Area Networks’ (snappy, huh?) within the IEEE Standards Association. The development of these ‘standards’ were so the technology was applied for things like wireless technology in a consistent way to be fit for purpose across all applicable scenarios.

So with this, Vic Hayes was dubbed the ‘father’ of Wi-Fi.

And with the need to brand ‘IEEE 802.11’ in a way that everyday consumers would remember, ‘Wi-Fi’ was born by marketing people from the group’s slogan containing ‘Wireless Fidelity’.

But from here, we go Down Under to find out who really made Wi-Fi an easily usable thing for all of us.

Wi-Fi Research from Australia

Up until 1996, Wi-Fi was not considered stable enough to be released to general consumers.

But in this year, CSIRO team leader John O’ Sullivan and his colleagues Terence Percival and Graham Daniels invented the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) prototype, using equipment such as a ‘40GHz Transmitter Unit’, ‘Fast Fourier Transfer (FTT)’ chip and analogue-to-digital/-digital-to-analogue converters.

Confusing equipment names aside, this Canberra-based team, in short, enabled high speed indoor wireless networking by solving the problem of radio waves bouncing off walls. In turn, this set the scene for internet users not needing their computers connected to a router via a physical (‘LAN’) cable.

And of course, this development opened up the doors for connecting to the web via all sorts of wireless devices–smart phones, tablets, laptops etc—as long as the user was within range of a modem/router.

Wi-Fi’s ‘Owners’

From the early to mid-90s, things moved in the legal and patent space for WLAN, including Australian company Radiata Inc taking out the original non-exclusive patent on the technology from the CSIRO. And then Radiata Inc were bought by Cisco Systems (for $567M!).

With this, the technology’s legal relationship with O’Sullivan, Percival and Daniels drifted further away. And in 2002, the first ‘unlicensed’ WLAN (ie, ‘Wi-Fi’) products started appearing on the market, from tech behemoths such as Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Netgear, HP and Apple. These companies even attempted to sue the CSIRO to declare their patent invalid – a clear irony of the beneficiaries suing their creator in order to capitalise on the technology without paying royalties.

When the Wi-Fi Wild West Was Won

The CSIRO fought back for their royalties and won, with 14 tech giants settling out of court separately, producing the sum total settlement of over $205M.

With newfound confidence, the CSIRO then went after the big USA telcos—AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA—for building their businesses off core CSIRO innovations for local connectivity, and also won; by 2015, the CSIRO had received over $450M in settlements, with over $150M being reinvested into future research.

So, while Australian-based CSIRO certainly added the final icing on the cake for making Wi-Fi stable enough for commercial release, it doesn’t mean that Wi-Fi as a whole is a solely Australian invention.

So, Again – Who Invented Wi-Fi?

As you can probably gather by now, there many key contributors in the history of Wi-Fi’s development. With this, again, there is no single inventor of the technology from conception to full commercial use.

From radio wave experiments of the late 1800s, to Hedy Lamarr’s work in the 1940s, the work of Vic Hayes from the 1970s to the early 1990s, and the CSIRO’s research and development in the 1990s, like many technologies, Wi-Fi was developed by a community of enthusiasts, engineers, scientists and the like over many decades, until the most user-beneficial viable product was ready for all to use.