This is later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast. More of what you here weekday afternoon is on the Drive. Greg Innis has been there since the very infancy of what we now consider basically a utility in every house WiFi. Vice President of Technology for the WiFi Analysis Alliance, Greg Innes was at the very center of the Wi Fi industry, and he's written all about it in a book called Beyond Everywhere, How Wi Fi became the World's most beloved technology.
Welcome Greg, Thank you, Lee, Nice to be here. Is that a fair assessment. It's something that at one point was a luxury we now consider a utility. Yeah, I think that is a fair assessment.
Billions of people all over the world depend upon Wi Fi every day. There's eighteen billion Wi Fi devices out there and four billion more sold every year, so clearly people are enjoying it. I remember the evolution of it just in my own household, starting out in the late eighties, early nineties, starting to work with it at work, and then slowly having it come into my house to the point where, oh, we've got to do an upgrade because
lovely wife can't download her recipes. I mean it seems to have been something that people needed, were hungry for, and didn't realize they were hungry for it. Yeah, well, you know it when it appeared, it was a liberating technology, right. It took away our dependence upon being connected with wires to the internet and allowed us to, you know, not just be wherever we wanted to be while we were connected, but to connect devices like
our televisions and our thermostats and all these other things that it supports. Now author of Beyond Everywhere, how WiFi became the world's most beloved technology. Vice president of Technology Technology for the Wi Fi Allowance, Greg Inness is the author and he's with us. I remember hearing stories from my grandfather when he told
the story of when and he was a little boy when this happened. I guess it was somewhere around maybe nineteen twenty, maybe twenty one, when he got the first telephone in his house and they were on a party line at the time, and he told me his grandfather, my great great grandfather, there goes our privacy. We're never going to be left alone. That damn thing's gonna be waking us up in the middle of the night. If he only knew what WiFi was how interconnected we are with WiFi? Right, So,
I mean it's amazing. I often think about that. That are we like to think how our generation is going through just this rapid technological change. But think about our grandparents generation, you know, I mean they saw the advent of automobiles and airplanes, you know, I mean they saw quite a bit come through their lives, just like we are now. Well, are we at, say the telephone phase of this, I mean, in the future, is it going to Is it going to exceed our wildest imagination like
the telephones from the nineteen twenties to today? Now do well, I think that it already has exceeded uh, you know, most people's expectations, and
it's just continuing. The technology is continuing to advance. You know. One of the exciting things that's happening now is that there's a new generation of Wi Fi that supports really dense environments with lots and lots of devices at very high speeds, and it's being put into sports stadiums all over America to you know, give those fans the ability to you know, watch instant video replays and to send videos to their friends who might not be with them there, and
it's going to support rock concerts as well. And I mean that's a that's a new generation of WiFi, that's that's going to end up benefiting everybody. But it's interesting to see that the sports stadiums have really latched onto this as something that they feel that they need to provide to their fans. I'm not surprised at all. Greg innis the author of Beyond Everywhere How WiFi became the
world's most beloved technology. When I have for my radio stations, do when we do a high school football game, Well, we use the Wi Fi technology to get our signal out of the stadium and back to the studio. And if we're in say a state championship playoff game, where they're very well maybe sixty thousand parents all on the phone talking, we start having problems.
Yeah, So you know, it's interesting. I mean, the latter chapters of Beyond Everywhere talk about the challenges that the WiFi industry had getting the Chinese government to allow WiFi into the country. You know, for a while, the government was actually disallowing any iPhones into China simply because the iPhones included Wi Fi. It's because they were promoting an alternative national technology that they didn't want
this foreign technology coming in. But what really changed everybody's mind was that the the Beijing Olympics decided to put a huge WiFi network in to support all all the stadiums and venues at the two thousand and eight Beijing Olympics, and that was like a huge showcase for WiFi that ended up convincing the government that they really should let let this new technology in and let it benefit their population as
well as the rest of the world beyond everywhere. How Wi Fi became the world's most beloved technology Written by a man who's seen it from the very beginning, Vice president of Technology if the Wi Fi Alliance, Greg Innis, and you just touched on it there. We hear so much about while that Internet
is just driving everybody apart, it's it's what's dividing us all. But I can't help but see that, Yeah, the divisiveness that may be a byproduct and some of the other bad aspects of what are happening are way are far outweighed by the benefits that we see with this connectivity, right, you know, we and so like like during COVID, you know when we were all locked up into our homes and uh, you know, WiFi played a tremendous role during that whole period because it allowed us to to you know, zoom
with our family and friends, do zoom video calls, and to and to do distance learning, and to have our medical appointments. Uh uh you know via the internet. I mean, WiFi really helped us get through that whole period. It's just a good example about how you know, technology isn't you know that it can be very very helpful to to people in their lives, whether it's radar or microwave or celluder technology. A lot of this is born
out of a government need for something. In the book Beyond Everywhere, you tell an anecdote of the of an FBI sting operation and how it contributed to Wi Fi's invention. Can you elaborate on that zone. Sure? Yeah.
So the Chicago Board of Trade, the commodities trading floor, was hit with an FBI sting operation back in nineteen eighty nine, and the the end result of that, of course, there were indictments and convictions of these fraudulent traders, but the real impact of that on the rest of the world was that that ended up leading to a mandate from the federal government that the commodities trading exchanges changed their way of doing things from this fraud prone manual system to a
wireless network of handheld terminals, and the network that was developed for you know, as a result of that, ended up being a major progenitor of WiFi, and many of the ideas that got developed in that in that project ended up seeing their way into what ultimately ultimately became the WiFi standards. So yeah, the very opening chapter of the book starts with an FBI sting operation, which probably surprises people that that's part of the WiFi story. Beyond Everywhere is
the Wi Fi story how WiFi became the world's most beloved technology. It's written by Vice president of Technology for Wi Fi Alliance Alliance, Greg Inness. I look forward to this read and thank you for bringing it to us. Okay, thank you, Lee. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews, the Lei Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to the Drive Live weekday afternoons from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation