What is Wifi and Wifi Standards?

We all have used Wifi in our lives, but do we really know the inside story about Wifi and rest of the technical aspects of it, if we know then its fine, if we don't then we will know after reading this article.

Wifi can be easily defined as a facility that allows computers, our smartphones, and other devices to get connected to the Internet and communicate with one another in a particular area. Whenever we want to learn about the Wifi there are some confusing terms comes during the learning period like Wifi a/b/g/n/ac, now what are they and why they are used I am going to tell in this article of mine.

• Wifi is not a new technology it is very old which was developed by IEEE, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in the year 1997. In the same year, they developed a standard for wifi and give it a number 802.11. Now, this number is given according to the various types of the communication medium that have been developed by IEEE, so when they developed Wifi they provided it the number 802.11 and called the standard as 802.11 Wifi. At that time the speed of Wifi was 2Mbps, which is two Megabits per second which was very slow, but at the time of development, it was considered good.


• In the Year 1999, IEEE comes up with two new standards of Wifi and named them as 802.11a and 802.11b. The first standard 802.11a was developed for commercial or office use and the second standard 802.11b was developed for personal or household use. The Wifi standard 802.11a was working on the 5GHz frequency and its speed was 54Mbps which was considered very good at that point of time. On the Other hand, the 802.11b standard was working on 2.4 GHz and its speed was 11Mbps. Now, here 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz are the two most used frequency bands reserved for this kind of activity, Bluetooth also works on the same, the more the frequency, the range of the signal will be smaller as the signal won't be able to penetrate for longer time although the higher the frequency, the faster the speed will be.


• In 2003 a new standard was developed and named as 802.11g, in this, the advantage of earlier two standards was joined together.The frequency range of 802.11b was used here that will give us a higher range and due to the collaboration of 802.11a, we get the faster speed.Now all the devices that we tend to see 5-10 years ago were working on this 802.11g standard only.


• In 2009, a new standard was developed named as 802.11n, here two frequency bands are used together of 5GHz and 2.4GHz  both were operated individually, and the speed can get to somewhere around 600Mbps, 802.11n is the most used standard till date and most of the devices are following the same standard today as well.


• In 2013 a new standard was developed named as 802.11ac, it works on the 5GHz frequency and the maximum speed that can be seen on devices is 1.6Gbps and in near future, it will give a speed of somewhere about 6.9Gbps but the range will be smaller as it works on 5GHz frequency.


• The Speed of Wifi represents the amount of data that can be transmitted and received in a second, as we know that whatever the data is transferred over the network or within the computer system is transferred in the form of bits that is either 0 or 1, so when we say that some standard give us the speed of 300Mbps it means that it can transmit and receive 300 Mega Bits or 300 Million bits will be transferred within a second. 

I hope this description about the various standards of Wifi has given you all an insight to the Wifi technology and in near future, we will be seeing more new standards coming up as well.