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They patented OFDM, which is the modulation technique that was introduced in 802.11a. They did not invent wifi. They just discovered an effective combination of
by ryao 10y ago
They patented OFDM, which is the modulation technique that was introduced in 802.11a. They did not invent wifi. They just discovered an effective combination of parameters and patented it before it was adopted. It is not clear to me if the adoption was because of the patent or because of independent discovery.
- mianos 10y agoNo they did not patent OFDM, the patented the combination of an OFDM encoding schema and forward ECC, which, in combination allowed effective data transmission in a highly reflective environment. Everything the patent was based on was already known. Patents like this are not for inventing something new but combining some existing things to allow something new.
- gilgoomesh 10y agoIt's much narrower than that. OFDM has been around since the 1960s. CSIRO didn't invent it. CSIRO patented its use in WLAN setups (including WiFi). It's controversial because they're only major first was to implement WLAN setups using OFDM with forward ECC. In any case they were merely taking something already used in cellular phone networks and applying to another kind of broadcast setup.