The Wi-Fi Alliance awards this logo to products that meet its interoperability standards, but its absence on a product’s packaging could just mean the manufacturer didn’t want to pay for the testing and certification.įrequency bands: Wi-Fi networks use two unlicensed frequency bands: 2.4 gigahertz (GHz) and 5GHz. Wi-Fi: a trademarked name used to cover network adapters that have passed a certification test to work with each other using various 802.11 specifications.
These specifications define how data is encoded into radio transmissions and exchanged among devices. We expect to see 802.11ax gear announced at CES. WLANs began in earnest with 802.11b in 1999 (802.11a came out at the same time, but had less traction), and the group is all the way up to 802.11ac and 802.11ad today.
802.11: the name of the IEEE engineering trade group’s working group for wireless local area networks (WLANs).
