Читать книгу Wi-Fi - Ellie Rennie - Страница 9

In the chapters that follow, we explore the historical trajectories of Wi-Fi in order to illuminate its present significance. We discuss Wi-Fi’s deep foundations in twentieth-century theories of wireless communication; its more immediate origins in the 1970s and 1980s, in wireless network experimentation and spectrum policymaking; its emergence as a focus of public and commercial research and development in the 1980s and 1990s; and its subsequent status as an evolving set of technical protocols supporting an accelerating proliferation of devices and ‘smart’ technologies. Our approach throughout is not to focus on the technical aspects of Wi-Fi – we note that the relevant standards in any case comprise a large and evolving group of technologies – but on its social and institutional contexts, its uses and applications.

We have already begun to sketch the place of Wi-Fi in contemporary digital experience. We now turn to a closer consideration of what its history tells us about the significance of Wi-Fi in its many guises – as marketing strategy, as technical protocol, as open industry standard, as public utility, and as intellectual property. Wi-Fi raises intriguing questions: about the prominent visibility of this embedded, mainly hidden form of infrastructure; about the control and ownership of Wi-Fi’s open standards; and about the place of Wi-Fi between the commercial tech industries, public utility, and the worlds of low-cost community and domestic networks. In order to address these questions, we can draw on both recent developments and some salient lessons from Wi-Fi’s complex past.