Making a fast and stable Wi-Fi technology actually works by slowing down the signal transmission speeds.
Radio waves bounce, which is how radar technology works.
That also means receivers can experience reverberation - a kind of interference - meaning the same message will arrive at the receiver at the same time.
Reverberation was a major problem with Wi-Fi solutions at the time of CSIRO's breakthrough.
The existing solutions were much slower in network speed, since slower transmissions helped reduce the reverberation from bouncing radio pulses.
CSIRO’s team consisted of radio astronomers Diet Ostry, Graham Daniels, John Deane, Terry Percival and John O’Sullivan.
CSIRO's WLAN patent team, from left, Terry Percival, John Deane, Diet Ostry, John O'Sullivan and Graham Daniels.
Source: csiro
What they tried to achieve at the time seemed like a massive increase in wireless network speeds, Doctor John O’Sullivan told SBS News.
"Back when we first started thinking about this, there were networks, but they were 50 or 100 times slower than what we were trying to do," Dr O’Sullivan said.
"One of the parts of our solution was to send a whole lot of bits on different frequencies at a slower rate, so the reverberation doesn’t affect them."
Splitting the signals was comparable to distributing bricks evenly on a truck, to make the load more stable, he said.
Multi-processor computers achieving higher speeds than single processor systems was another useful analogy, he said.
The concept which allowed the CSIRO team to split signals into smaller components and then recombine them at the receiver is drawn on an algorithm called Fast Fourier Transforms. The CSIRO did not invent FFT, but were responsible for the method of using FFT to send and receive signals.
Different people in CSIRO's team had different areas of expertise and Dr O’Sullivan did not claim the breakthrough for himself.
"The beautifully simple way we came to use [FFT] didn’t come from me," he said.
"My interest in some of the underlying technology here was searching for black holes."
He said that search was unsuccessful, but that was not a failure; it disproved a theory and provoked him to consider the wider application of FFT years before the Wi-Fi breakthrough.
