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his is the story of how a small group of Australian scientists beat the world’s heaviest computer hitters to one of the biggest inventions of our time.

Its one of the most important inventions that Australians have made. Its epic sweep runs from the dusty fields of outback NSW to a courtroom showdown in Texas.

It's almost like it's a dream that's going to burst when I wake up, said Dr. Terry Percival.

This is the true story of the invention of modern wifi … and how the credit was nearly lost.


Now, unless you’ve been living in a cave for the last few years, you’ve probably heard of wifi. Basically, if you have one of these gadgets in your home or business, you can connect computers, printers, phones and the web wirelessly via radio waves. Yet this ultimate symbol of global connectedness began life in one of the more remote parts of the world, said Dr. Jonica Newby

The radio telescopes of outback New South Wales, where back in the 80’s a young Dr John O’ Sullivan was practicing extreme radio astronomy, searching for exploding black holes.

We were looking at hundreds of metres of film looking for small v shaped patterns in it. pause to look And ah I'm I guess I'm inherently lazy so I was starting to think at that time hey there must be a better way of doing this, cited by Dr. Sullivan.

So, John O'Sullivan invented what would prove to be the key to this whole extraordinary story – the Fast Fourier Transform Chip. Fourier transformation is a mathematical equation which changes information from one form into another … say from radio waves to a spectrum. The beauty of John’s chip was that it could perform thousands of these rapidly.

Fast forward to 1990, to the Radio-physics division of Australia’s venerable research institution, the CSIRO. Flushed with their success in designing Australia’s famous radio-telescopes, the division were wondering what to do next.

What was happening was that portable computers were starting to appear on the scene. I guess I thought and, so did John that portable computers didn't really have anywhere to plug in.

And being extreme radio folk, they thought why plug in to a network when you could do it wirelessly? It was incredibly forward thinking.

In those days we'd never even seen a laptop or a mobile phone and so the excitement of trying to work on something that was going to be sort of the future of communications a bit like you know with the communicators in Star Trek.

Trouble was, there were some basic laws of physics in the way, sometimes called the cavern problem.

The sound reverbs around. Indoors, my voice bounces off every surface, so echoes distort the message. The same thing happens if my message is in radio-waves.

And the view we took was it has to be as good as the best wired networks. So now we were looking at a problem that was you know well beyond what anybody was thinking they could tackle, said O'Sullivan.

They didn’t know it at the time, but 22 other major research groups around the world were trying, and failing to solve this problem. But these guys were outliers. They weren’t from mainstream computer firms. And over a mere 6 months, this is the solution the tiny team came up with.

Enter John’s fast Fourier Transform chip. It can make multiple copies on different frequencies. So even if not all arrive, enough will to construct the message. It means you can send lots of data slowly, but simultaneously

Dr Terry Percival
It was a fantastic chip, that was what gave us the edge over the rest of the world cause no one even thought that you could do that, said by Dr. Percival.

But what if some parts of the message are still lost - one can’t afford errors in data transmission.

That problem was solved through clever coding using extra copies and error correction. The message can now be unpacked and errors corrected instantly at the other end.

There was a really good moment when the signals were bouncing all over the place and the error rate that we had measured said zero point zero zero zero zero zero. At that point we said yes we've cracked it!

They’d come up with a solution so perfect, it seemed no one would be able to do it better. Now to sell their invention to the world Plane takes off, or not.

They were generally polite but you got the body language that it was a bit of a yawn and they weren't really interested and these crazy guys from Australia, said by Dr. Percival.

Remember, this was 1993. Most people couldn’t imagine a future of streaming video. And at the time, their invention wasn’t even commercially viable – chips weren’t fast enough to run it. In 1996, their invention was granted a patent. Then, as the digital decade surged forward, it became clear CSIRO’s method was indeed the best. In 1999, it was written into the international standards for high speed wifi. From 2000, high speed wifi began to appear in laptops, phones and homes.

Well we weren't concerned that they'd stolen the technology. We were, we thought this is great, everyone's using our technology.I think we were a little bit naive as to how easy it would be to get the recognition for our patent, Dr. Percival.

In 2002, Nigel Poole joined the CSIRO. A businessmen, he was determined to claw back the royalties he believed they were due.

Poole wrote letters to the companies who we thought were using our technology and we gave them a certain amount of time to have a think about that. And of course in the end um none of them decided they wanted to take a licence. So we decided to have a test case.

In February 2005, CSIRO sued the tech company Buffalo. Suddenly the big guns unexpectedly came out. Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Netgear and Apple all sued the CSIRO to declare its patent invalid.

Led by Nigel, they decided to counterfile against a further 8 companies at the end of 2006. This was deep waters - the biggest fight CSIRO had ever taken on. And it wasn’t just about the money – at stake was their people’s legacy as the true inventors of high speed wifi. But they were up against 14 of the most powerful computer companies in the world.

Every year there'd be, seemed to be another flight over to the US where I'd have these lawyers throwing documents at me which I'd written maybe fifteen years ago and pointing to page twenty one and saying what did you mean by that. And this went on and on, said Dr. Percival.

But the showdown when it came in April 2009, seemed all too soon … fittingly enough in a small courtroom in Texas.

When Dr. Percival walked into the court room and there was a swinging and the, the judge sitting at his large desk and the jury in the jury box. And all these lawyers ah sitting in tables in front of you. It was very nerve-racking.

Meanwhile, outside the court, a second team were deep in their own drama.

So we have no idea what’s going on in the courtroom but we’re meeting the 14 defendents trying to settle thing, said Dennis Redfern.

But the days went by, one by one, their opponents began to lay down their guns and settle.

Dr. Percival was in the office on the Sunday morning ah sitting down doing some preparation for my next appearance in the court, and suddenly I hear this almighty cheer. The last company had, had agreed to settle the case.I've never seen so many smiles on thirty people's faces.

With the trial aborted, they never did get to hear the jury’s verdict. But to the original team, it feels like the vindication they’ve so long sought – they really did invent high speed wi-fi.

Every time I pull my mobile out and say yeah yeah I that's gotten the same, the same technology. My laptop has the same technology yeah, you can't help but feel pride, said O'Sullivan.

And it all came about from the blue sky research field of extreme-radio-astronomy.