Everybody knows Wi-Fi. It’s the magical invisible signal that somehow moves hundreds of gigabytes of data through the air and makes all your devices work online.
But few people know what Wi-Fi actually means – and it’s not what you think.
In fact, people are having their minds blown when they learn that not only does Wi-Fi NOT mean ‘wireless fidelity’ like they thought, but it actually doesn’t mean anything at all.
Posting on Reddit, user u/Beardsman805 said about a fact from a Jeopardy gameshow host: “I was in and out of the room, so it’s possible I missed some context, but Ken stated that Wi-Fi means nothing, but I always knew it to stand for Wireless Fidelity. Did anyone else notice this?”
At this point, lots of users rushed in to confirm that in fact, that is correct and was chosen because it sounds like Hi-fi, which means high fidelity in audio equipment.
u/eaglebtc said: “Phil Belanger, a founding member of the Wi-Fi Alliance, has comprehensively dispelled the idea: “Wi-Fi doesn’t stand for anything. It is not an acronym. There is no meaning.”
In full quotes from the Wifi inventor, Phil confirmed that it was made up by marketing teams and the term ‘wireless fidelity’ was added later to try to calm down nervous marketers who wanted people to have ‘some sort of literal explanation’.
He said: “Wi-Fi doesn’t stand for anything. It is not an acronym. There is no meaning. Wi-Fi and the ying yang style logo were invented by Interbrand. We (the founding members of the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, now called the Wi-Fi Alliance) hired Interbrand to come up with the name and logo that we could use for our interoperability seal and marketing efforts. We needed something that was a little catchier than “IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence”.
“The only reason that you hear anything about “Wireless Fidelity” is some of my colleagues in the group were afraid. They didn’t understand branding or marketing. They could not imagine using the name “Wi-Fi” without having some sort of literal explanation. So we compromised and agreed to include the tag line “The Standard for Wireless Fidelity” along with the name.
“This was a mistake and only served to confuse people and dilute the brand. For the first year or so (circa 2000) , this would appear in all of our communications. I still have a hat and a couple of golf shirts with the tag line. Later, when Wi-Fi was becoming more successful and we got some marketing and business people from larger companies on the board, the alliance dropped the tag-line.”
He added a plea at the end as he added: “So we were smart to hire Interbrand to come up with the name and logo. We were dumb to confuse and water down their efforts by adding the meaningless tag line. Please help reinforce the good work that we did and forget the tag line.”
Reddit users were blown away. u/empressmc said: “I yelled “WHAT?!” at the screen, drifted through two more clues then paused the show to have my husband reiterate what I just learned. Generally if Jeopardy teaches me something entirely new, I’ll say, “that’s a great piece of trivia.” This, I was dumbfounded.”
u/ohlalalavieenrose added: “One of the few times watching Jeopardy that I could feel my mind being blown.”
