In October 2000, Apple offered to loan me some of their still-new AirPort wireless networking gear that used a year-or-so old new technology called IEEE 80211.b, also known by its trade name, Wi-Fi (from the Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance’s testing and trademark group). I almost passed them up.

I’d used so-called “wireless networking” before in the form of infrared, and I had read accounts of the fussiness and low data rates of early plain 802.11 (no b) equipment. Wired 10Base-T (phone jack style) and 10Base-2 (coax) offered an incredible 10 megabits per second (Mbps). A couple Mbps seemed paltry. I’d also played with Ricochet, a wide-area networking service that had been deployed around the Seattle area by Metricom. It seemed more likely. Apple was still on the brink of failure, too, after disastrous management decisions across the 1990s.

But I said yes, they sent me the plug-in AirPort Cards and spaceship AirPort Base Station I needed. I set it up and I was hooked. This was the future! It felt magical and worked surprisingly well. I’d also noticed that a few companies were installing public Wi-Fi, or hotspots, in cafés and hotel lobbies and elsewhere. It seemed like something big was brewing.

I had been writing freelance for the New York Times Circuits section since 1998, and I pitched my editor on a big story about this coming trend. In the end, on February 22, 2001, they gave me the section front cover and a chunk inside—more than a page of the larger format Times of the day. It was very exciting professionally.

Being an overachiever with these early NYT articles, I had interviewed a ton of people to understand the space. I had a pile of research and stories left over that weren’t included in the Times story. I thought the subject area might become big. Blogs had just started to peak over the edge of the internet table, so I started what was originally the 802.11b Networking News blog, and soon became Wi-Fi Networking News.

For about a decade, I filed stories on this blog, which generated varying amounts of income—enough at one point to hire Nancy Gohring for contract writing. Nancy had a deep telecom and business journalism experience, and the two of us churned out quite a lot at some points. We rode through the rise of faster and faster flavors of the Wi-Fi; I added additional dedicated vertical blogs for WiMax (an Intel-backed technology that failed), cellular data, and other topics. City-wide Wi-Fi became a huge topic for a bit, but the technology of the time couldn’t meet the hype or purpose, and licensed cellular data networks filled that hole.

Along the way, the blog was an incredible calling card to editors and publications, and I wrote dozens, maybe hundreds of articles for a variety of specialized and mainstream sites and periodicals about Wi-Fi. I was widely quoted on the topic, too.

By 2011, traffic had dropped off precipitously, along with ad sales, subscribers to a mailing list, and general interest. I finally pulled the plug just under 10 years in August 2011 on new posts. The entire archives remain available.

The fellow at the iBook at right in the Times article above was photographed in a café in Fremont, California, in the Centerville Train Station, which was an early one equipped with Wi-Fi. It was also leased by my dad decades earlier when it was a furniture store and we lived in Fremont!