The 802.11 standard, developed by the IEEE, for wireless network technology may have looked like gibberish to a lot of you until date, but the Wi-Fi Alliance has now decided to simplify the naming criterion with the announcement of the next-gen standard. The new Wi-Fi standard, i.e 802.11ax has been dubbed Wi-Fi 6.
This should make Wi-Fi product descriptions a lot easier to read. The Wi-Fi alliance announced this change via an official blog post, where tit said that the new naming convention provides users with an ‘easy-to-understand’ designation while buying a device with wireless connectivity.
Just like with Bluetooth, you can now easily tell which generation is the latest. Talking about the new naming scheme for Wi-Fi technologies, Edgar Figueroa, President and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance, in a press statement said,
“For nearly two decades, Wi-Fi users have had to sort through technical naming conventions to determine if their devices support the latest Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi Alliance is excited to introduce Wi-Fi 6, and present a new naming scheme to help industry and Wi-Fi users easily understand the Wi-Fi generation supported by their device or connection.”
The new scheme also applies to older versions of Wi-Fi standard. Here’s the new naming scheme of all the Wi-Fi generations:
- Wi-Fi 1 – 802.11b
- Wi-Fi 2 – 802.11a
- Wi-Fi 3 – 802.11g
- Wi-Fi 4 – 802.11n
- Wi-Fi 5 – 802.11ac
- Wi-Fi 6 – 802.11ax
The Wi-Fi Alliance has also given a look at how the Wi-Fi technologies will be represented visually by product makers or OS vendors.
They will be able to include the new Wi-Fi logo into their products to make users aware of the Wi-Fi standard being used in the same. We can expect to see Wi-Fi 6 devices, certified by the organization, early next year.