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It’s a classic pub-quiz trivia question: who invented Wi-Fi? Australia! The clever country, creators of one of the hallmark technologies of the internet age.
On a day the Trump White House is reconsidering the scientific funding it sends Down Under, the story of Wi-Fi deserves scrutiny.
Did the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation really invent Wi-Fi?
Did the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation really invent Wi-Fi?Credit: Bloomberg
Because on a closer reading, the story of who “invented Wi-Fi” is much more complex and contested.
And I worry this tale, heavily promoted by CSIRO, distracts us from the ugly realities of our struggling scientific ecosystem, which we continue to fail to invest in.
Imagine what “inventing Wi-Fi” might look like. A clever team of inventors making something genuinely new. A working product. Commercialisation.
US scientists had a working Wi-Fi network in 1970. The first Wi-Fi standard as we know it was published by the American Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1997, and it did not include CSIRO technology; it’s contested if CSIRO was even involved.
In the early ’90s a CSIRO team managed to solve the “multipath problem” – Wi-Fi interference caused by signals bouncing off walls and furniture. They patented it in 1992. But that tech wasn’t included until Wi-Fi’s third generation, in 1999.
It wasn’t until 2002, The Australian Financial Review has reported, that CSIRO realised it had such a valuable patent. The organisation designated it a “RIPPER”: reclaimed intellectual property promising exceptional returns.
A CSIRO spin-off to commercialise the technology did eventually manage to sell a working chip, but the company was wound down in 2004 – just as the Wi-Fi revolution was really beginning. Other efforts to sell the tech directly to Apple or HP were rebuffed.
CSIRO’s biggest success was not developing the technology but fighting over it in court. The organisation filed lawsuits against multiple companies alleging patent infringement after Wi-Fi had become a dominant technology. The companies accused CSIRO of being “swindlers”, but ultimately settled for hundreds of millions of dollars after a US court upheld the patent.
“CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it,” a lawyer for CSIRO said, according to a history of the case by tech publication Ars Technica.
Maybe. One of the companies sued would later claim in court it had never even heard of CSIRO, let alone stolen the organisation’s idea.
Is a victory in court a sign of a successful Australian innovation ecosystem making breakthroughs that push us forward? I’m sceptical.
Credit: Matt Golding
All this brings us to Donald Trump, and the state of our science ecosystem. The US is our largest foreign research funder, providing $386 million in funding last year, but the country is now questioning how much value for money it gets. As it has a right to do.
“The fact they did not ask questions before now is maybe a little surprising,” one leading scientist told me on Monday. “The question is, why are we so reliant on the US?”
Since 1945, the US has sought to create a liberal international order based on rules, trade and co-operation – with its extraordinary economy, military, and research apparatus at the centre. We have been huge beneficiaries.
The Trump administration seems determined to break this system and return us to a more mercantile era, one in which countries ask: what’s in it for me?
“The narrative of partnering with those who share our values is no longer workable,” Anna-Maria Arabia, CEO of the Australian Academy of Science, told me.
We rely heavily on the US for research funding. We rely on the US to an extraordinary extent for our research infrastructure. We use its genetic data in our flu vaccines. The US monitors for hurricanes and rogue asteroids. We get its satellite data – for free.
This level of dependence, of expecting other countries to commercialise our discoveries so we can buy them back at a higher cost, has left our research system weak – a fact laid bare by an extraordinary discussion paper released in February by a government panel reviewing Australian research and development.
Our research sector operates in isolation from our economy, the paper notes. Research and development spending has declined for 15 years (we now, amazingly, spend less than any other advanced economy). Our “economic complexity” – our ability to use new knowledge to make complex new things – is ranked 102 in the world, below Rwanda, Namibia and Uganda.
Rather than properly fund research to increase our ability to make new things, previous governments have encouraged universities to enrol huge numbers of overcharged, under-educated international students to fund research.
That misguided policy has essentially given China, the main source of international students, influence over our research system at a time when relations between our two nations are fraught.
Current Science Minister Ed Husic seems to have a real vision for change and is actually doing something about it. He has set national science priorities. His reviews of the entire R&D sector could, if allowed to bear fruit, actually lead to a proper integration of a heavily siloed sector.
Perhaps most promisingly, he has picked an actual Australian competitive advantage – quantum computing – and made a large blue-sky investment in building a working device.
His plans may come to naught. Research is inherently risky. But accepting the status quo is in my view a much bigger risk.
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Liam Mannix is The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald's national science reporter.Connect via Twitter.