How much do you know about the history of WiFi?

In 1896, Italian Guglielmo Marconi realized the first radio communication in human history. From then on, mankind opened the door to the world of radio.

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937)

The wireless telegraph at that time used a spark-gap transmitter, and the signal content transmitted was Morse code.

This wireless telegraph cannot receive and send at the same time, so the speed of sending and receiving telegrams is slow and the efficiency is low.

A telegraph operator "listening" to a telegram

The development of radio broadcasting business is paralleled by the development of wireless telegraph business, which is another important application of wireless technology.

The world's first radio station

As the number of broadcast and radio stations on Earth continues to increase, wireless interference is becoming more and more serious.

In this situation, the government began to intervene, regulating wireless broadcasting and unifying the management of radio frequency use.

This is where the spectrum licensing system comes in.

In the 1970s, cellular mobile communications began to emerge and also did not escape the spectrum licensing system.

At that time, the agency responsible for managing and authorizing spectrum in the United States was the FCC (Federal Communications Commission).

FCC logo

After entering the 1980s, with the rapid development of technologies such as microcircuits and digital signal processing, wireless technology has made rapid progress, new wireless devices have been invented, and new mobile communication standards have emerged. However, due to the spectrum authorization system, the research and development of these new devices and technologies has been severely restricted.

At this time, a key figure appeared - he was Michael Marcus (later known as the "Godfather of WiFi").

Marcus was just an ordinary engineer at the FCC at the time.

One day, he made a suggestion to his leader: he hoped to set up some unlicensed spectrum and open it to the industry, and appropriately increase the transmission power of these unlicensed spectrum devices so that they can cover a range of tens to hundreds of meters. If this is done, it will help encourage technology companies to make more innovations and bring greater economic benefits.

The FCC adopted his suggestion and solicited opinions from all walks of life. However, the feedback it received was completely irresponsible:

As long as you don’t occupy my frequency band, you can do whatever you want!

Yes, at that time the frequency band resources had been severely occupied, and no one wanted to release the frequency bands in their hands.

Finally, the FCC could only release three unpopular "junk bands" from the few available bands. These bands are what we often refer to as ISM bands.

These frequency bands are mainly open to use in the three fields of industry, science and medicine. They are free licenses, so they are also called "unlicensed spectrum."

In terms of device transmission power, the FCC stipulates that the device transmission power in these new unlicensed frequency bands can reach 1W.

No one would have thought that it was this 1W that would lead to the creation of today's WiFi, Bluetooth, ZigBee and other short-range communication technologies.

At the time, the FCC required products in these new unlicensed bands to use spread spectrum technology in order to avoid interference between devices.

The so-called spread spectrum technology is that the bandwidth used to transmit information is much larger than the bandwidth of the information itself. Spread spectrum modulation is performed at the transmitting end using spread spectrum coding, and information is received at the receiving end using correlation demodulation technology. Spread spectrum technology was first used in the military field and has the characteristics of high reliability, high confidentiality and not susceptible to interference.

After the FCC's new regulations were introduced, they were widely welcomed by the industry. However, just as everyone was busy with development, new problems emerged:

There is no unified standard in the entire industry.

At that time, many wireless product equipment manufacturers were developing their own dedicated equipment, and no one cared about each other. The equipment between different manufacturers was simply incompatible.

In 1988, NCR Corporation of the United States wanted to use unlicensed frequency bands to make wireless cash registers (NCR was the first company in the world to make mechanical and electric cash registers, and was later acquired by AT&T). So, they found Victor Hayes, an engineer in their R&D department, and asked him how to do this?

Victor Hayes

Victor Hayes was very forward-looking and believed that a unified standard must be established first. Then, Victor Hayes and another Bell Labs engineer Bruce Tuch approached IEEE, hoping to establish a universal unlicensed spectrum standard.

IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Therefore, in the early 1990s, IEEE established the famous 802.11 working group, with Victor Hayes as chairman.

At the same time, in 1991, NCR's engineering team and its joint venture partner AT&T developed WaveLAN technology in Neuwegein, the Netherlands. This technology is considered the prototype of Wi-Fi.

So, is NCR the inventor of Wi-Fi? No.

While NCR was working on WaveLAN, the Australian government's research agency CSIRO also invented a wireless network technology, specifically invented by John O'Sullivan and his team at the University of Sydney. 

Dr John O'Sullivan

In 1996, they successfully applied for a technical patent in the United States, with the patent number being US Patent Number 5,487,069. (Later, they even fought a lawsuit over this patent.)

In 1999, when IEEE officially defined the 802.11 standard, it selected and recognized the wireless network technology invented by CSIRO as the best wireless network technology in the world, and therefore incorporated it as the core technical standard of Wi-Fi.

Finally, the standard versions of IEEE802.11: 802.11b (operating in the 2.4 GHz band) and 802.11a (operating in the 5.8 GHz band) were approved in December 1999 and January 2000, respectively.

While the working group was busy determining the standard, six companies, Intersil, 3Com, Nokia, Aironet, Symbol and Lucent, formed the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA).

The main purpose of establishing WECA is to certify the compatibility of products from different manufacturers and achieve interoperability between equipment from different manufacturers.

After the alliance was established, in order to facilitate market promotion, everyone discussed and planned to change a resounding name, such as "WECA compatible", "IEEE802.11b compatible", etc. However, such a stagnant term is difficult for people to pronounce. For this matter, WECA also consulted brand experts, who gave them a lot of suggestions, such as "FlankSpeed", "DragonFly", etc.

In the end, the name "Wi-Fi" won out.

The reason why it is called "Wi-Fi" is that it sounds a bit like "HiFi", which makes people think that CD players from different manufacturers can be compatible with any amplifier device. Later, some people said that "Wi-Fi" is the abbreviation of "wireless fidelity", which is actually just a later assumption.

In October 2002, WECA was officially renamed Wi-Fi Alliance.

The technology has been standardized and the stage name has been chosen, so what should we do now?

Hold the thigh.

No matter how good your technology is, there must be people willing to use it and equipment manufacturers who can support it.

So, Lucent in the Wi-Fi Alliance approached Apple, hoping that Wi-Fi could be introduced into their products.

Apple was very arrogant. They told Lucent: If you can reduce the price of your wireless adapter to less than $100, we will design a Wi-Fi slot into the notebook.

Lucent agreed.

In July 1999, Apple introduced Wi-Fi for the first time in its new generation of iBook laptops, but it was not a standard feature but an optional option.

Jobs demonstrates the "wireless" magic of the iBook G3, which he named "AirPort"

However, it was this "option" that quickly attracted other computer manufacturers to follow suit.

Not only have hardware manufacturers followed up on Wi-Fi, Microsoft's Windows XP operating system has also added support for Wi-Fi (users do not need to install third-party drivers or software to achieve wireless connection).

Since then, the use of Wi-Fi has continued to expand, from individuals to families, from homes to public places, and has entered the lives of each of us.

At this time, the IEEE802.11 working group readjusted the IEEE802.11 protocol standard and launched a new physical layer standard IEEE802.11g. It uses a more advanced spread spectrum technology called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) modulation technology, and its rate can reach 54Mbps in the 2.4GHz frequency band.

Later, there were 802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ad, etc.

The Development Trajectory of 802.11

Because the naming method such as 802.11a/b/n/g/ac/ax is really confusing and it is difficult to easily see the order, the IEEE decided to use numerical naming starting from 802.11ax.

And 802.11ax is the Wi-Fi 6 that is now extremely popular.

After more than 20 years of development, the transmission speed of Wi-Fi 6 is already 873 times that of the first generation of Wi-Fi. 

It has to be said that Wi-Fi is a very successful wireless communication technology that has changed our lives to a great extent.

Today, Wi-Fi has come to a crossroads in history. Facing the challenge of 5G, where will it go? Let time tell us the answer.