Remember the ol’ days of dial-up internet? When you got disconnected every time the phone rang and used up all your drive space to download one little file? Man, life was hard.

Luckily in the 90s our peeps came up with a little something called WiFi – and hallelujah all of our first world problems were solved.

Using the same mathematics that astronomers initially applied to piece together the waves from black holes, the potential of WiFi became ‘patently’ clear to its inventors. Today, its myriad of applications have fundamentally changed how we think of and use technology in our daily lives. In fact, by the end of this year more than 5 billion devices will be connected to our WiFi patented technology. The discovery is one of our most successful inventions to date and is internationally recognised as a great Aussie science success story.

This infographic (right) explains how WiFi technology was created and how it actually works (click for full size).

While WiFi was developed as part of our previous ICT Centre and Radiophysics Research Division, our main wireless networks laboratory is now a part of our new Computational Informatics Research Division and has approximately 50 researchers located at our Marsfield site in Sydney.

These days, we are working with industry partners around the world on new challenges such as using wireless tracking tools to help improve the performance of athletes and ensuring the safety of miners, firefighters and emergency service personnel. We’re also helping farmers monitor soil fertility, crop growth and animal health by integrating wireless networks with centralized cloud computing.

Learn more about how we patented Wireless LAN technology.

Media: Dan Chamberlain. P: +61 2 9372 4491 M: 0477 708 849 Email: daniel.chamberlain@csiro.au