This year is the twentieth anniversary of the formation of the Wi-Fi Alliance and the launch of commercial Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi has become so ubiquitous in our lives that it’s hard to believe that it’s only been twenty years since all broadband connections came with wires.

In 1999 most people were still using dial-up and that’s the year when early adapters started buying DSL. I remember having incredibly long phone cords so that I could use my laptop at different places around the house. When I bought DSL, I became tied to the desk with the DSL modem because I couldn’t find equally long cords to carry DSL all over the house.

I remember the day I bought my first Linksys Wi-Fi router. At that time, I think the only device in my home that would talk to Wi-Fi was my laptop. I was able to use that laptop everywhere around the house, and I remember how liberating it felt to be able to use the laptop on the front porch. I got my first carrier-class Wi-Fi router when I upgraded to fiber on Verizon FiOS. Even then I think the only devices in my house that communicated with the Wi-Fi router were a desktop and some laptops – the world had not yet started to build Wi-Fi into numerous devices. Today my home is crammed full of Wi-Fi-capable devices and it’s hard to imagine going without the wireless technology.

There’s an article in the current Wired by Jeff Abramowitz discussing how Wi-Fi as we know it almost didn’t happen. At the time that 802.11b was introduced there was a competing technology called HomeRF that was being pushed as a home wireless solution. We easily could have ended up with HomeRF used in the home and 802.11b used in the office. That would have meant no easy transition of devices from office to home, which would likely have stymied the ubiquitous Wi-Fi we have today.

The growth of Wi-Fi required free spectrum to thrive, and for that, we can thank microwave ovens. Microwave ovens were first developed in the 1940s and emitted radiation the 2.45 GHz frequency. In the 1960s practically every home bought a microwave oven, and at that time the devices didn’t have great shielding. Since the microwave ovens polluted the spectrum on both sides of the 2.45 GHz band, the FCC decided in 1985 to add frequency bands on both sides of that spectrum, creating the ISM band that was open for anybody to use. With the radio technology available at the time nobody wanted to put any commercial usage too close to leaky microwave ovens. Since then, microwave ovens have better shielding and radios are more accurate in pinpointing narrow channels, and we can now use most of what the FCC had considered in 1985 to be junk spectrum.

I am amused every time I hear somebody in the industry say that broadband is going wireless – and by that, they mean 5G cellular. Today the average cellphone customer uses about 6 GB of cellular data per month. What the cellphone companies don’t talk about is that the average cellphone user also consumes three times that much data each month on Wi-Fi connection. The fact is that our cellphones are mostly Wi-Fi devices that can change to cellular data when we’re out of reach of our homes, schools, and offices.

Wi-Fi is about to take another big leap forward as WiFi 6 is being officially released this month. This newest version of Wi-Fi uses less energy, reduces latency, increases performance in crowded wireless environments, and allows for faster speeds. Wi-Fi has gotten a lot more sophisticated with the introduction of techniques like beamforming and the technology is light years ahead of what first came out in 1999. In those early days, a Wi-Fi modem was just good enough to handle the 1 Mbps DSL and cable modems broadband of the day.

Device manufacturers love Wi-Fi. Estimates vary, but there are predictions that there will be something like 10 billion worldwide Wi-Fi connected devices in 2020 and 22 billion by 2025 – which would be nearly three Wi-Fi devices for every person on the planet. Those are unbelievable numbers for a technology that only came into existence twenty years ago. The manufacturers must be thrilled knowing that we’ll all be buying new devices to upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 over the next few years.

If Wi-Fi was a person, I’d bake them a cake or buy them a drink to honor this birthday. I’ll have to settle for thanking all of those who have contributed over the years to turn the Wi-Fi concept into the robust products that have changed all of our lives.