Home Wireless Networks history

In 1999, Hayes and his team at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) updated the standard for WiFi to 802.11b.

The world’s first 3G service began in Japan in October 2001 with a system offered by NTT DoCoMo.

The then-proposed 802.11g standard was rapidly adopted in the market starting in January 2003, well before ratification, due to the desire for higher data rates as well as to reductions in manufacturing costs.

Laptop PCs with Wi-Fi soon followed, and the first mobile phones certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance were introduced in 2004.

Upon approval on March 8, 2007, 802.11REVma was renamed to the then-current base standard IEEE 802.11-2007.

The IEEE has approved the amendment, and it was published in October 2009.

Upon publication on March 29, 2012, the new standard was referred to as IEEE 802.11-2012.

64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). As of October 2013, high-end implementations support 80 MHz channels, three spatial streams, and 256-QAM, yielding a data rate of up to 433.3 Mbit/s per spatial stream, 1300 Mbit/s total, in 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band.

IEEE 802.11af, also referred to as “White-Fi” and “Super Wi-Fi” is an amendment, approved in February 2014, that allows WLAN operation in TV white space spectrum in the VHF and UHF bands between 54 and 790 MHz.

In 2015, the 802.11 committee created a series of short YouTube videos to mark their 25th anniversary.

IEEE 802.11ah defines a WLAN system operating at sub-1 GHz license-exempt bands, with final approval slated for September 2016.

The original 802.11 standard allowed a maximum data transmission rate of only 2 megabits per second (Mbps); 802.11ax, dubbed Wi-Fi 6 by the Wi-Fi Alliance and introduced in 2019, has a maximum theoretical rate of 9.6 gigabits per second (Gbps).

The release of WiFi 6 in 2020 promoted great promise for faster connectivity and linkup between technologies with speeds of up to 9.6 Gbps, which is up almost 300% from 3.5 Gbps on Wi-Fi 5.