Wi-Fi Standards
It’s 1896, and a man walks casually down the street somewhere in the UK when they’re startled by the excited yawp of Guglielmo Marconi, who just successfully tested his Hertzian Wave detector. The man doesn’t know, nor could he know, that he’s possibly been witness to the largest single technological advancement in human history so far - radio; and, for us, Wi-Fi.
But, whoa whoa whoa - not yet. We’ve got a long way to go, and we still don’t actually have any idea what exactly we’re detecting until around 1905, and radio isn’t being used for anything substantial until 1907, and in give or take one hundred years, Wi-Fi finally hits the mainstream through personal computers, laptops and cellphones. So what exactly is Wi-Fi, and how do we go about understanding the various standards, nomenclature, etc., and know what’s best for us?
Stick with me, and we’ll learn together about Wi-Fi today, it’s progression over the last twenty-or-so years, and take a look into its future while gaining an understanding on the terms and features, and become better consumers along the way.
Wi-Fi Standards Over Time
If you take a look at the graph displayed above, you’ll see that since Wi-Fi’s real introduction into the market in 1997, it had relatively linear growth until now, when it’s seeing massive gains in potential overall speed. Why is that, and what features lead to this unreal upswing in performance? To discover what’s happened, let’s talk about features.
Development
When Wi-Fi 0 was introduced, it was the public’s first advantage taken of a 1985 which allowed certain radio channels to be used for public purpose. In 1991, Wi-Fi was first developed, but it wasn’t called that, and a bunch of early network enthusiasts and corporations were developing in-house wireless networking protocols. In 1997, the IEEE standards board made the first draft of 802, which governs standardization of all wireless communications technology for computer applications.
So Wi-Fi 0 was fairly simple, and wasn’t even called Wi-Fi 0. It was experimental, no one used it, and certainly no one relied on it. However, some optimizations and development in antenna technology turned Wi-Fi 0 into what we now call Wi-Fi 1, but really was a change in base code for communications that was standardized as 802.11b. It was a standard that could achieve right under 6/MBs with TCP traffic and just over 7MB/s with UDP traffic. At the time, this was really impressive, but it was quickly dismissed and made obsolete with the implementation of the 5GHz band with Wi-Fi 2.
Other than the use of the 5GHz band, there weren’t many differences between Wi-Fi 1 and 2, but of course, moving to a faster broadcasting frequency drastically increased transfer speeds, up to a maximum 54Mbits/s. However, this presented an issue, as some devices had antennas that could only talk over 2.4GHz, and some over 5GHz. It was still single-lane communication, and was still using the same messaging standards as Wi-Fi 1, but was a major step forward, and is still supported widely today.
Further tuning led to more reliable antennas, which led to the development of 802.11g, or Wi-Fi 3, which was a 2.4GHz band that utilized bigger single packets of data to match Wi-Fi 2’s maximum 54Mbit/s throughput on a 2.4GHz band, and what’s most impressive is that through developments of the technology within the standard, 802.11g is still in use today, and can deliver up to 72Mb/s throughput on 2.4GHz. Now, we’re stepping into truly modern technology that’s genuinely serviceable today. Really, really impressive.
Wi-Fi 4 was another massive step forward, this time not just making one improvement, but two! The two standards or Wi-Fi 2 and 3 were combined into one standard antenna, so 2.4GHz and 5GHz devices could connect to one antenna, speeds over 5GHz were greatly improved, AND multi-in multi-out (or MIMO) technology was brought into the marketplace. Up until this point, one AP could only service one device at a time (as a concise visual, A————B), but now, with dual lane MIMO, one AP could have multiple streams communicating with four devices at once (A=======BC), vastly improving performance. Maximum theoretical speeds skyrocketed from 54Mbits/s to 600Mbits/s as a result, making Wi-Fi competitive with wired connections in many circumstances.
At this point, you can see on the graph a huge bump from Wi-Fi 4 to 5, and ultimately, MIMO is the reason why, and it’s the reason why maximum theoretical speeds get exponential from here on. Wi-Fi 5 takes maximum theoretical bandwidth to 3,466.8Mbits/s, literal gigabytes per second over the air, with backwards compatibility for devices that support all the older standards, and because of MIMO, the slowest device on the network didn’t slow down the network like before. Wild.
Now we’re in 2013, and the Wi-Fi landscape went quiet for a while. People were working on it for sure, and trying to come up with new ideas, but nothing happened until in 2019, Wi-Fi 6 came on the scene. Tolerances for Wi-Fi antennas had been refined pretty far, and it was difficult to squeeze another improvement out of the standard, but 5GHz got faster, more efficient, and able to more quickly talk with more clients. Speeds increased to 4804Mbits/s, and the environment was close to another improvement made possible by further efficiencies accomplished in Wi-Fi 6.
6GHz. Wi-Fi 6E is the first standard to be notated like this, and it’s called 6E to play off of the high-efficiency that Wi-Fi 6 was known for. 6E included support for 6GHz, 5GHz and 2.4GHz, but still has separate SSIDs for each band. Speeds more than doubled to a theoretical 9608Mbits/s. Blazing.
Wi-Fi 7 isn’t quite here yet. It’s close, and you can find antennas out there, but they’re wildly expensive and not yet worth it (good luck finding devices that can take advantage of it), but it’s very exciting. Essentially, say goodbye to multiple SSIDs. 2.4GHz, 5GHz and 6GHz, all on one SSID, and your devices and APs negotiate to discover which SSID works best for your device based on it’s hardware and signal strength. That is to say, if you have a doorbell which can only talk on 2.4GHz, than it’ll sit right there. If you have a flagship phone next year that can talk on all, from 2.4-6GHz, than it will negotiate and use whichever signal serves it best. That means that if you’re close, it’ll hop on 6GHz, and if you walk down the driveway to get the mail, it’ll move over to 2.4GHz so you don’t lose connection and still have the best experience you can possibly have.
Key Features
So, what should you buy, or what features should you keep an eye out for? Well, it depends, on budget, on your current devices, etc., but at this moment I would always recommend Wi-Fi 6 devices (like the AP U6 Lite)for home clients and small businesses, and 6E (like the AP U6 Enterprise)for large enterprise clients. Wi-Fi 6 for the average consumer is abundantly faster than they’ll likely ever need, and it’s inexpensive to boot. Enterprise clients will want stronger signal over greater distances, and a larger capacity for client devices, so they’ll need to pony up a bit if they want to serve those clients well.
There are so many devices on the market, and there are so many opinions about what’s best, and it’s genuinely really difficult to make a good decision sometimes, but at least if you’ve read this, you’ll understand where we’ve been, you’ll understand where we’re going, and you’ll be prepared to ask informed questions and make informed decisions.
