Of course there's not going to be wi-fi on short notice, but I'll tell you what: there can and plausibly will be wi-fi a few centuries after industrialisation. It's just that the whole frickin' premise of "ancient industrialisation" is flawed. It's not like we can say "oh, Rome now industrialises". That's not happening. Realistically, we can create a POD whereby Rome starts moving towards industrialisation, ad successively invents the heavy plough, the blast furnace, the printing press, paper, the concept of zero, a positional number system, etc. etc.
And
then you get to around the point where we can expect useful steam enginges, railroads and thast sort of stuff.
Industry. To be clear, by the time we get to that point, we'll be a few hundred years into the TL. So it's not like "year 100 AD: Rome industrialises", but more like "POD in 100 AD, and by 600 AD, given a
lot of luck, we can start thinking about that industrial revolution coming around".
And then maybe 250 years after that, yeah, sure. I can see wi-fi. And that may sound ridiculous - wi-fi in 850 AD! - but in this ATL, the tech level around 600 would be roughly analogous to OTL's tech level of about 1750. I take 1750 as a benchmark for comparison, since it's pretty generally agreed that OTL's industrialisation got underway no sooner than
that. So I'm marking that time as "the earliest years of the industrial revolution". And based on that general date, we can see that
astounding progress and exponential growth of wealth are possible due to industrialisation. In OTL, 250 years after the very earliest beginnings of true industrialisation... we
did have wi-fi.
So, yeah. An "ancient industrialisation" TL that has wi-fi, say, two centuries after the POD is utter nonsense. Because an ancient TL that just has industry showing up out of nowhere is utter nonsense to begin with. But a TL that has the ancient world gradually move towards industry... well, that kind of TL could (if it's on the optimistic side) plausibly give us wi-fi some 750 years after the initial POD. Mind you, that kind of timeframe still demands everything goes right, and inventions are just conveniently made etc. -- More realistically, an ancient POD could very plausibly see an industrial revolution maybe a thousand years after the POD, and wi-fi 250 years after
that. Well. A POD of 100 AD would still give us wi-fi by c. 1350 AD. That's nothing to joke about, I'd say!
