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This is later with Lee Matthews the
Lee Matthews Podcast. More of what you

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here weekday afternoon is on the Drive. Greg Innis has been there since the

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very infancy of what we now consider
basically a utility in every house WiFi.

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Vice President of Technology for the WiFi
Analysis Alliance, Greg Innes was at the

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very center of the Wi Fi industry, and he's written all about it in

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a book called Beyond Everywhere, How
Wi Fi became the World's most beloved technology.

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Welcome Greg, Thank you, Lee, Nice to be here. Is

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that a fair assessment. It's something
that at one point was a luxury we

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now consider a utility. Yeah,
I think that is a fair assessment.

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Billions of people all over the world
depend upon Wi Fi every day. There's

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eighteen billion Wi Fi devices out there
and four billion more sold every year,

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so clearly people are enjoying it.
I remember the evolution of it just in

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my own household, starting out in
the late eighties, early nineties, starting

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to work with it at work,
and then slowly having it come into my

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house to the point where, oh, we've got to do an upgrade because

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lovely wife can't download her recipes.
I mean it seems to have been something

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that people needed, were hungry for, and didn't realize they were hungry for

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it. Yeah, well, you
know it when it appeared, it was

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a liberating technology, right. It
took away our dependence upon being connected with

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wires to the internet and allowed us
to, you know, not just be

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wherever we wanted to be while we
were connected, but to connect devices like

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our televisions and our thermostats and all
these other things that it supports. Now

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author of Beyond Everywhere, how WiFi
became the world's most beloved technology. Vice

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president of Technology Technology for the Wi
Fi Allowance, Greg Inness is the author

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and he's with us. I remember
hearing stories from my grandfather when he told

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the story of when and he was
a little boy when this happened. I

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guess it was somewhere around maybe nineteen
twenty, maybe twenty one, when he

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got the first telephone in his house
and they were on a party line at

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the time, and he told me
his grandfather, my great great grandfather,

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there goes our privacy. We're never
going to be left alone. That damn

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thing's gonna be waking us up in
the middle of the night. If he

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only knew what WiFi was how interconnected
we are with WiFi? Right, So,

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I mean it's amazing. I often
think about that. That are we

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like to think how our generation is
going through just this rapid technological change.

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But think about our grandparents generation,
you know, I mean they saw the

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advent of automobiles and airplanes, you
know, I mean they saw quite a

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bit come through their lives, just
like we are now. Well, are

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we at, say the telephone phase
of this, I mean, in the

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future, is it going to Is
it going to exceed our wildest imagination like

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the telephones from the nineteen twenties to
today? Now do well, I think

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that it already has exceeded uh,
you know, most people's expectations, and

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it's just continuing. The technology is
continuing to advance. You know. One

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of the exciting things that's happening now
is that there's a new generation of Wi

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Fi that supports really dense environments with
lots and lots of devices at very high

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speeds, and it's being put into
sports stadiums all over America to you know,

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give those fans the ability to you
know, watch instant video replays and

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to send videos to their friends who
might not be with them there, and

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it's going to support rock concerts as
well. And I mean that's a that's

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a new generation of WiFi, that's
that's going to end up benefiting everybody.

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But it's interesting to see that the
sports stadiums have really latched onto this as

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something that they feel that they need
to provide to their fans. I'm not

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surprised at all. Greg innis the
author of Beyond Everywhere How WiFi became the

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world's most beloved technology. When I
have for my radio stations, do when

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we do a high school football game, Well, we use the Wi Fi

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technology to get our signal out of
the stadium and back to the studio.

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And if we're in say a state
championship playoff game, where they're very well

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maybe sixty thousand parents all on the
phone talking, we start having problems.

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Yeah, So you know, it's
interesting. I mean, the latter chapters

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of Beyond Everywhere talk about the challenges
that the WiFi industry had getting the Chinese

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government to allow WiFi into the country. You know, for a while,

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the government was actually disallowing any iPhones
into China simply because the iPhones included Wi

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Fi. It's because they were promoting
an alternative national technology that they didn't want

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this foreign technology coming in. But
what really changed everybody's mind was that the

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the Beijing Olympics decided to put a
huge WiFi network in to support all all

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the stadiums and venues at the two
thousand and eight Beijing Olympics, and that

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was like a huge showcase for WiFi
that ended up convincing the government that they

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really should let let this new technology
in and let it benefit their population as

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well as the rest of the world
beyond everywhere. How Wi Fi became the

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world's most beloved technology Written by a
man who's seen it from the very beginning,

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Vice president of Technology if the Wi
Fi Alliance, Greg Innis, and

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you just touched on it there.
We hear so much about while that Internet

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is just driving everybody apart, it's
it's what's dividing us all. But I

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can't help but see that, Yeah, the divisiveness that may be a byproduct

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and some of the other bad aspects
of what are happening are way are far

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outweighed by the benefits that we see
with this connectivity, right, you know,

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we and so like like during COVID, you know when we were all

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locked up into our homes and uh, you know, WiFi played a tremendous

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role during that whole period because it
allowed us to to you know, zoom

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with our family and friends, do
zoom video calls, and to and to

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do distance learning, and to have
our medical appointments. Uh uh you know

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via the internet. I mean,
WiFi really helped us get through that whole

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period. It's just a good example
about how you know, technology isn't you

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know that it can be very very
helpful to to people in their lives,

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whether it's radar or microwave or celluder
technology. A lot of this is born

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out of a government need for something. In the book Beyond Everywhere, you

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tell an anecdote of the of an
FBI sting operation and how it contributed to

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Wi Fi's invention. Can you elaborate
on that zone. Sure? Yeah.

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So the Chicago Board of Trade,
the commodities trading floor, was hit with

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an FBI sting operation back in nineteen
eighty nine, and the the end result

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of that, of course, there
were indictments and convictions of these fraudulent traders,

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but the real impact of that on
the rest of the world was that

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that ended up leading to a mandate
from the federal government that the commodities trading

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exchanges changed their way of doing things
from this fraud prone manual system to a

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wireless network of handheld terminals, and
the network that was developed for you know,

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as a result of that, ended
up being a major progenitor of WiFi,

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and many of the ideas that got
developed in that in that project ended

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up seeing their way into what ultimately
ultimately became the WiFi standards. So yeah,

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the very opening chapter of the book
starts with an FBI sting operation,

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which probably surprises people that that's part
of the WiFi story. Beyond Everywhere is

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the Wi Fi story how WiFi became
the world's most beloved technology. It's written

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by Vice president of Technology for Wi
Fi Alliance Alliance, Greg Inness. I

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look forward to this read and thank
you for bringing it to us. Okay,

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thank you, Lee. Thanks for
listening to Later with Lee Matthews,

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the Lei Matthews Podcast, and remember
to listen to the Drive Live weekday afternoons

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from five to seven and iHeartMedia Presentation