Wi-Fi. Ellie Rennie

that, in fact, very little of the Ars Technica argument is inconsistent with CSIRO’s position, which was not that their scientists had invented Wi-Fi, but that their innovations had substantially improved it, making it fast enough to substitute for wired ethernet networks and therefore (the argument went) to become as successful as it did. Nor does patent law require proof of copying or piratical intent: infringement simply involves unlicensed use of the protected invention.

      The Ars Technica position is that it is unconscionable that a very substantial interest in the technology could be assigned to a non-participant in the IEEE process. There is a strong pragmatic point at stake here about the strategies the IEEE deploys for the social organization of innovation. The standardization process was in essence a consensus-building approach, and there can be little doubt that the successful achievement of consensus – after many years, in the case of 802.11 – was critically important to the later success of Wi-Fi. But these processes, no matter how exacting, are never entirely inclusive, and cannot preclude contestation in the legal domain over ownership and control. While the IEEE managed the formative process, it could not control the consequences.

If the contested claims at the heart of the CSIRO patent dispute are understood as arguments about history, they are likely to be incommensurable rather than finally resolvable. The answer to the Ars Technica question – why is the history in dispute? – lies in the fact that Wi-Fi encompasses many histories, and it does so because of its distributed character. Wi-Fi is not like our smartphones; this is not a platform owned by any single entity or controlled by anyone. (Even CSIRO’s patents are now expired.) It is not – so far at least – like 5G, which now figures in global economic and political rivalries. Huawei is banned from providing 5G equipment in the United States and some other Western countries, but no such prohibition applies to its activities in the Wi-Fi domain (including telecommunications). Wi-Fi has avoided a strong association with any government, despite the contributions of public bodies and public policy to its emergence. For these reasons, there is more at stake in disputes such as the CSIRO case than just patent royalties. They remind us how important wireless communication is to the objective of a more mobile and inclusive internet. They remind us that wireless communication need not be framed as national technology strategizing. They remind us that the internet can be substantially built around basic, low-cost hardware, and commonly agreed standards available to everyone.

Overview of chapters

      Wi-Fi is an ‘entangled infrastructure’. Our account of its social significance proceeds from the observation that its uses, and the debates these generate, are highly contextual. What Wi-Fi does and why it matters depends on where you are, in spatial, social, and institutional terms. So, in this book, we approach Wi-Fi across a series of different kinds of locations and at increasing social scales – the household, the community, the city. In all these contexts, we describe the transformative impact and animating potential of Wi-Fi as a distinctive form of infrastructure. We show how in different ways, Wi-Fi works not only as an occasionally essential digital service, but also as a powerful symbolic resource. Wi-Fi is an idea as well as a marketing phenomenon and technical construction, and much discourse about Wi-Fi retains a promise of the future, just as the memory of Jobs’s 1999 showmanship persists. Chapter 2 shows how Wi-Fi’s infrastructural dimensions and historical trajectories reveal a strong aspirational element. The proponents of Wi-Fi project ideas about communication possibilities: flexible, inclusive, inexpensive, grassroots technology, designed for the scale of households and communities. Wi-Fi’s symbolic power often works to expand digital participation. Public Wi-Fi fills gaps where other services fail, but it can also crowd out more ambitious strategies for an inclusive internet.

Our discussion then moves to the household. Internet scholars have written extensively about the domestication of certain technologies – the means by which they are appropriated and adapted into everyday life, and especially the private world of the home (Haddon, 2006). Those studies have rarely included close consideration of Wi-Fi, but in Chapter 3 we look at the continuing mutation of domestic Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi complicates standard accounts of domestic technology: we consider the ways in which, while being appropriated into the home, Wi-Fi itself may be said to domesticate households. In Chapter 4, we focus on initiatives at the level of communities, returning to the aspirational dimensions of Wi-Fi, examining the conditions of possibility for community networks, their modes of control, and the forms of agency they offer. Chapter 5 locates Wi-Fi in the urban history of communication, an addition to the enveloping ‘hertzian space’ of urban radio traffic. Urban Wi-Fi is a sharply contested space, where we find influential but sharply divergent visions for communication futures. These include competing understandings of ‘free’ Wi-Fi, municipal Wi-Fi, and the Wi-Fi-enabled ‘smart city’. We then conclude the book with reflections on Wi-Fi’s current problems and future prospects.