The term "Wireless Valley" has several competing users.

It seems to have been coined around 1990 by Ted Rappaport while he was a professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, alluding to his research program in wireless communications and the location of Blacksburg between the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains. He later founded Wireless Valley® Communications, which trademarked the phrase "Wireless Valley" in the United States.

Wireless Valley is also a nickname and an attempt to describe the cluster of companies in the information technology industry that located in northern Stockholm, Sweden. This also included a number of companies that saw themselves as belonging to the new information based economy. The nickname was based on an analogy to California's Silicon Valley and reflected the hopes of trying to mimic that success.

Ericsson, the worlds leading supplier in telecommunications has one of its main plants in the Stockholm suburb of Kista.

Finland also has a high-tech area in Espoo, sometimes called "Wireless Valley", based around Nokia.