What is 802.11?
Definition
802.11 is the IEEE family of standards that defines how wireless local area networks work at the physical and data link layers. Each amendment, such as 802.11n, 802.11ac, 802.11ax and 802.11be, adds new radio techniques and is marketed by the WiFi Alliance as WiFi 4, 5, 6 and 7.
802.11 explained
The IEEE maintains 802.11 as the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications for wireless LAN communication. The WiFi Alliance then certifies products against those specifications, which is what lets an access point from one vendor serve a phone from another. When a data sheet quotes a standard, it is quoting an 802.11 amendment.
Each amendment solves the problem of its day. 802.11ac (WiFi 5) moved enterprise networks onto wide 5 GHz channels and introduced downlink MU-MIMO. 802.11ax (WiFi 6) added OFDMA and BSS colouring for dense venues, and WiFi 6E extended it into 6 GHz. 802.11be (WiFi 7) adds Multi-Link Operation, 320 MHz channels, 4K-QAM and Multi-RU.
Smaller amendments matter too. 802.11r and 802.11k speed up roaming between access points, and 802.11u is the foundation of Hotspot 2.0 and Passpoint. For a venue, the practical question is which amendments your access points and your visitors’ devices both support, because a network only runs as fast as that overlap allows.
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