and rebuilding proceeded.
Events also moved on: by March 2020, and only barely after the worst of the fires in Australia, a new catastrophe engulfed us, of a kind few expected. In the space of just a year, the Covid-19 pandemic has taken over 2 million lives. In order to control the spread of the virus, governments around the world froze their economies. They closed borders, schools, universities, and businesses. Millions of people lost their jobs. Those who could work from home were required or impelled to do so. For those families that were connected, parents began supervising their children’s online lessons, juggling school with the imperatives of work. For households without internet, the difficulties were multiplied. According to UNICEF, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (2020), around a third of the world’s school children were without access to remote learning, making it impossible for them to continue their education.
Figure 1.1 A mobile Wi-Fi hotspot, provided by the Australian internet network operator NBN during the 2019/20 bushfire season, at an evacuation centre, Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales. The truck offers free Wi-Fi and device charging. It connects to the internet through NBN’s satellite service. Source: NBN Co. Ltd.
For us, the authors of this book, and for many others, the pandemic abruptly suspended mobile working lives, the everyday cycles of work at the office and periodic travel for meetings, research, and conferences. Working at home was always a necessary part of that cycle; now, for those fortunate enough to keep their jobs or find new ones, working space and domestic space entirely converged. New physical and functional segmentations of the home were required to make work and study spaces for everyone, from the kitchen table to the corners of rooms and corridors intended for other things. Home Wi-Fi assumed a critical role, as we rapidly came to rely on it for maintaining the simultaneous multiplicity of education, family, and social connections, as well as the everyday tasks of teaching, research, and professional communication.
The pandemic created a new ‘landscape of risk’ (Robinson et al., 2020; Zinn and McDonald, 2018). For those connected people able to work and shelter at home, Wi-Fi made possible a domestic bubble, a safer space offering shelter while the pandemic progressed. These people were the best placed to sustain their health and welfare during the pandemic. They could carry on without greatly exposing themselves to the risk of infection. Outside the bubble, the experiences of those without affordable communications and the skills to use them were very different. Just as the role of private Wi-Fi suddenly expanded in the home, so access to public Wi-Fi receded just as quickly. Libraries, schools, and universities closed. Cafés where students once lingered over their laptops were reduced to serving coffee to go. Many people avoided public transport if possible. Low-income families with school age children, homeless and vulnerable people, were all suddenly more socially and economically isolated by virtue of their digital disconnection. Soon after cities began to shut down, reports appeared of people working from their cars in library parking lots, attempting to use the Wi-Fi from outside.
Why Wi-Fi?
The short-range wireless networking capabilities we commonly call Wi-Fi first became part of everyday digital experience (and everyday digital folklore) two decades prior to the pandemic, when then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously showed off his company’s new notebook computer, the iBook. The iBook of 1999 was a colourful, translucently plastic device. As a millennial design object, it broke with the blocky, grey, corporate-looking laptops of the time. The iBook invited us to see through its translucent case into the machine’s internals, and its organic form and integrated handle suggested an easy portability. The built-in Wi-Fi promised a seamlessly connected future, signalling the end of the era when communication was constrained by the messy physicality of cables, plugs, and sockets.
The iBook was new, but it popularized a technology that had been in development for well over a decade, building on ideas and applications with a considerably longer history. We discuss some of these below and in the chapters that follow. From today’s vantage point, Wi-Fi is no longer an emerging technology, but it is an extraordinarily successful one, now deeply embedded in everyday social and economic life. It has successively moved beyond the laptop into phones, games consoles, music players, televisions, and a suite of ‘smart home’ devices, from speakers to security cameras.
Like television, Wi-Fi has changed public and private spaces, from households to cafés, hospitals, and libraries. It has changed the way people work, travel, and entertain themselves, enabling the creation of new markets, new spin-off technologies, and new cultural practices. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry certifying body which controls the Wi-Fi trademark, estimates that, as of 2020, over 13 billion Wi-Fi devices are in use, and that 4 billion Wi-Fi devices were shipped in 2019 (Wi-Fi Alliance, 2020b). So, in the space of a few decades, the global population of Wi-Fi devices has grown to comfortably exceed the number of humans. The Alliance claims that Wi-Fi is the single most-used medium for global internet traffic, and contributes substantially to the world’s 3 trillion dollar mobile internet economy (2020b). One database of publicly accessible open access networks reports that there are now over 40 million free Wi-Fi hotspots globally, with almost half a million of these descendants of the public phone booth in Indonesia alone (Wiman, 2020). Growth at the global scale has also been spectacular at a domestic level. According to one market analysis, broadband-connected households in the United States in 2018 had an average of 9.1 Wi-Fi connected devices (Parks Associates, 2018).
Wi-Fi indeed seems to be everywhere, as those big numbers suggest. But if wireless broadband once appeared magical, there is a risk that for many of us it may now seem mundane. Wi-Fi predated the take-up of 3G mobile networks in the first decade of the new millennium: it offered the first accessible form of mobile broadband. Most people’s computing experiences are now both mobile and connected. We are familiar with both the convenience of Wi-Fi and its irritations: the glitchy slow-downs, the password problems, the scams, the patchy coverage, the surveillance, the highly restricted public networks, and the consequences of constant connection for work and social life. Cellular wireless services are now often faster – and sometimes much faster – than Wi-Fi. In many ways, Wi-Fi has both exceeded the expectations of its early advocates and disappointed them.
Figure 1.2 Internet everywhere: public Wi-Fi, Talinn, Estonia. Source: authors’ own.
Wi-Fi’s fundamental capability is that it enables shared, flexible, and relatively low-cost access to the internet, a valuable resource. This gives rise to a set of distinctive attributes, and these are at the heart of both the extraordinary successes of Wi-Fi and its failures. As we describe, Wi-Fi is an unusual form of network infrastructure, which augments and sometimes substitutes for other networks, while proving resistant to the power of both internet platforms and large service providers. In households, communities, and cities, Wi-Fi can work as a gap filler and a network extender. It does not rely on cutting-edge technologies or high-end processors, and Wi-Fi chips are produced in huge numbers, so the hardware is cheap. Its transmissions use the shared, publicly available spectrum, so users do not bear the costs of exclusive commercial spectrum licences. It is usually deployed on the edges of communication networks, within households and public spaces, by both end users and internet access companies. In telecommunications-speak, Wi-Fi is a ‘last mile’ technology, which can be provided, managed, and adapted by internet users themselves, whether these are families, institutions, or local communities. By the same token, the deployment of Wi-Fi doesn’t directly change underlying network infrastructures, such as the distribution or ownership of high-speed cables and switches. Nor does it change market structures, policies, or pricing models which substantially determine where and how people can connect. This means that Wi-Fi on its own is unlikely to bridge the digital divide or equalize the social distribution of digital resources. Despite the hopes of some its early advocates, Wi-Fi has not displaced