Has anybody ever wondered what Wi-Fi means? I have, though I never got a satisfactory answer to it and I still have no idea why it's called Wi-Fi.
Actually, I kind of thought the "Wi" part stood for wireless since it is a wireless connection but I couldn't wrap my head around the "Fi" part and what it could be in relation to the whole term.
It turns out, it doesn't mean anything. It's all a bunch of marketing hokum.
Wi-Fi Alliance founding member Phil Belanger shared the history of the term with Boing Boing back in 2005. It seems the wireless industry was seeking a user-friendly name to refer to technology that adhered to standards known as IEEE 802.11.
“We needed something that was a little catchier than ‘IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence,’” he explained. The Wi-Fi Alliance hired Interbrand to come up with ideas, and the brand consultancy proposed 10 names, including Wi-Fi (which sounds lot like “hi-fi,” AKA “high fidelity”).
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The current standard is WPA: Wi-Fi Protected Access which is an acronym made, in part, from an abbreviation which in turn was created to sound like a marketing term (Hi-Fi) from a time before stereo for a technology (vinyl records) that died before many of us were alive.