Oh, I'm so happy it's a number that seems to correspond to something (as long as the next one is 7 or 8 or some integer slightly larger than 6).
I look at wifi tech so rarely that I've mostly skipped a standard once or twice, but that just means I'm confused when I look at what's being offered. 802.11n? 802.11ac? What's better? If it's not as clear cut, which one came out later and is likely to be backwards compatible with the prior one?
If it was single letter increasing without large gaps, that might have been easier, but from what I remember, b wasn't strictly better than a when they were both first out (from looking at the info now, a has a higher rate, but suffers from obstructions and other interference more).
> At least this naming is a good deal clearer than HDMI's confusing version and feature mix or USB's Speed names.
Yes. As I understand it, USB is particularly bad where there's often confusion over the connectors, cable, and protocol, especially at the USB-c level.
That's not an accurate statement. "802.11ac" denotes a set of features, and many of them apply to and benefit the 2.4 GHz band. For example 256QAM encoding boosts the max data rate by 20 or 33% on this band for, respectively, 20 and 40 MHz channels.
https://www.cwnp.com/forums/posts?postNum=307358
I always heard that 802.11ac was 5GHz only, and that on dual-band, stations would stick with 802.11n for 2.4GHz
https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/wirele...
The only problem is that your phone might not be able to talk to your router through your bathroom wall any more. But that capability was always a sign of wi-fi being too noisy—imagine a light that can manage to penetrate a bathroom wall, and tell me you don’t think it’s maybe a bit too powerful for consumer use ;)
Sometimes. 5GHz is great for apartments (where you have lots of noise and a tiny area) and offices (where you have lots of noise and a large budget), but for a villa 2.4GHz usually hits the sweet spot between noise and coverage.
Visible light has a wavelength of a few hundred nanometers; wifi is around 10 centimeters. Material penetrability varies enormously between different wavelengths (and between materials). Harm to humans also various enormously, and in a way very different from penetrability (for example, some wavelengths of UVC are very harmful to human skin but can be almost completely blocked by a thin sheet of clear glass). Equating penetrability with either 'power' or harmfulness is not a useful intuition.
(incidentally, an incandescent light bulb emits on a blackbody spectrum, so some very small proportion of the energy it uses will be emitted at e.g. radio wave frequencies, which will certainly penetrate the bathroom wall)
Most 802.11b and 802.11g devices didn't support 802.11a (due to it requiring 5Ghz), so I'm guessing version 1 is 802.11 and 802.11a isn't part of the version numbers.
The best description I've heard for 1-3 was to use roughly the consumer hardware adoption curve which was 1 (b), [briefly] 2 (a), 3 (g).
(This is, of course, a Very Important Question.)
From that perspective A, B, and G were all sold as three separate things to consumers, so it makes sense to count all three.
802.11b is part of 802.11-1999. 802.11-1997 describes the older Direct Spread (DS) and Frequency-Hopping (FS) standards in 2.4GHz.
802.11a and 802.11b were both ratified on 16 September 1999. 802.11g wasn't ratified until 12 June 2003.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/Reports/802.11_Timelin...
As far as I can tell, all of these numbers are new. At least this naming is a good deal clearer than HDMI's confusing version and feature mix or USB's Speed names.
What isn't clear is how much control the Wi-Fi Alliance has over the tech industry and how their branding is used, but it looks like they might be able to compel a lot of companies to adopt this new naming. They've got standards for logos on things like your computer or phone, so we'll see if these start getting adopted by major manufacturers.