What is Wifi?
WiFi stands for Wireless Fidelity. It is based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards and is mainly a local area networking (LAN) technology designed to provide in-building broadband coverage.
Nowadays, WiFi has become the de facto standard for last mile broadband connectivity in homes, offices, and public hotspot locations. Systems can typically provide a coverage range of only about 1,000 feet from the access point.
Wifi Standards
The 802.11 standard is defined through several specifications of WLANs. It defines an over-the-air interface between a wireless client and a base station or between two wireless clients.
802.11b
• 802.11b was approved in 1999.
• It uses the same 2.4 GHz frequency as the original 802.11 standard.
• It supports a maximum theoretical rate of 11 Mbps and has a range up to 150 feet.
• 802.11b components are cheap, but the standard has the slowest maximum speed of all the 802.11 standards.
• And since 802.11b operates in the 2.4 GHz, home appliances or other 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi networks can cause interference.
802.11a
• It was released at the same time as 802.11b.
• It introduced a more complex technique, known as OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) for generating the wireless signal.
• 802.11a offers a few advantages over 802.11b: it operates in the less crowded 5 GHz frequency band, making it less prone to interference.
• Its bandwidth is much higher than 802.11b, with a theoretical max of 54 Mbps.
• Users probably haven’t encountered many 802.11a devices or routers in the market. This is because 802.11b devices were cheaper and became more popular in the consumer market.
• 802.11a was mainly used in business applications.
802.11g
• 802.11g was approved in 2003.
• The 802.11g standard uses the same OFDM technology introduced with 802.11a. Like 802.11a, it supports a maximum theoretical rate of 54 Mbps.
• It operates in the crowded 2.4 GHz like 802.11b
• It has same interference issues like 802.11b
• 802.11g is backward compatible with 802.11b devices: an 802.11b device can connect to an 802.11g access point (but at 802.11b speeds).
• It supports good Wi-Fi speeds and coverage. At the same time, consumer wireless routers were getting better, with higher power and better coverage than earlier generations
802.11n (Wifi-4)
• 802.11n was approved in 2009.
• With the 802.11n standard, Wi-Fi became even faster and more reliable.
• It supports a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 300 Mbps (and can reach up to 450 Mbps when using three antennae).
• 802.11n uses MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) where multiple transmitters/receivers operate simultaneously at one or both ends of the link.
• This provides a significant increase in data without needing a higher bandwidth or transmit power. 802.11n operates in both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands.
• When you hear wireless LAN vendors use the term “dual-band”, it refers to being able to deliver data across these two frequencies.
802.11ac (Wifi-5)
• It was introduced in 2014
• 802.11ac supercharges Wi-Fi, with speeds ranging from 433 Mbps all the way up to several Gigabits per second.
• To achieve this high speed performance, 802.11ac works exclusively in the 5 GHz band, supports up to eight spatial streams (compared with 802.11n’s four streams), doubles the channel width up to 80 MHz
• It uses a technology called beamforming. With beamforming, the antennae basically transmit the radio signals so they’re directed at a specific device.
• Another significant advancement with 802.11ac is multi-user (MU-MIMO). While MIMO directs multiple streams to a single client, MU-MIMO can direct the spatial streams to multiple clients simultaneously.
• While MU-MIMO doesn’t increase the speed to any single client, it can increase the overall data throughput of the entire network.
802.11ax (Wifi-6)
• It is known as High Efficiency WLAN
• 802.11ax aims to improve the performance in WLAN deployments in dense scenarios, such as sports stadiums and airports.
• It is still operating in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz spectrum.
• The group is targeting at least a 4X improvement in throughput compared to 802.11n and 802.11ac., through more efficient spectrum utilization.
• Approval is estimated to be in July 2019.
• 802.11ax is significantly faster.
• For example, if one assumes the speed is increased by 4x with 160 MHz channels, the speed of a single 802.11ax stream will be 3.5Gbps. The equivalent 802.11ac connection will be 866 Mbps. A 4×4 MIMO environment would result in a total capacity of about 14 Gbps
Can all Wifi standards communicate with each other?
Two devices using the same Wi-Fi standard can communicate without issues or restriction.
When you try to connect two devices that use different, potentially incompatible standards, issues will arise.
• In recent times, your router and devices using 802.11ac can communicate well.
• Devices that use 802.11b, g, and n can all communicate with an ac router.
• 802.11a cannot communicate with 802.11b devices, and vice versa.
The original 1997 standard (now known as 802.11 legacy) is now outdated, while the a and b standards are nearing the end of their lifespan
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