Orphan: date=February 2009 Professor Nicholas Negroponte of the Media Lab at MIT originated the meme, which has since been associated with his name. As more mobile devices need connections to the data network, and bandwidths required and deliverable in wired or fibre-optic systems grow, it becomes steadily less sensible to use wireless broadcast as a way of communicating with static installations.

At some point the switch takes place, as the limited radio bandwidth is reallocated to data service to mobile equipment, and television and other media move to cable.

Cory Doctorow an author and also sometime Electronic Frontier Foundation activist has described the process of the switch as unwiring, which is also a move away from a global internetwork which in reality passes through many chokepoints where data may be controlled and inspected toward one which uses available bandwidth frugally by passing communications in a mesh and avoids chokepoints.

Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross write of it, firstly in work associated with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and other techno-futurist groupings, and secondly in their collaboration on a novel in progress Unwirers, which is published in its evolving state.