Wi-Fi Alliance to simplify naming standards; Wi-Fi 6 to be out in 2019

Notice those weird numbers such as “802.11ac” or “a/b/g/n. mentioned alongside a phone or device’s Wi-Fi capability? You don’t need us to tell you that these characters mean complete gibberish to a person who doesn’t understand them. It does become confusing but it is also important to know what this random assortment of characters and numbers mean. Can you tell if 802.11g Wi-Fi is better than 802.11b? Well, pretty soon you just might.

Basically, 802.11g or  802.11b are just versions of Wi-Fi and have been set by the Wi-Fi Alliance which is a group that stewards the implementation of Wi-Fi. Every incremental version of Wi-Fi is obviously better than the last and supports faster speeds along with more parallel connections. We are currently on 802.11ac and almost all current generation smartphones will support this standard.

The problem is that these standards are just hard to remember. However, it looks like the Wi-Fi Alliance is going to do something about it. Now W-Fi 802.11ac is going to be renamed as Wi-Fi 5 since it is the fifth version of Wi-Fi.

With this naming process in place you don’t have to worry if the 802.11g is better than 802.11b as they will be assigned numerical values based on their version number. So 802.11g will be Wi-Fi 3 and 802.11b will be Wi-Fi 1 and clearly, Wi-Fi 3 is better than Wi-Fi 1. This is important so that you make informed choices about the Wi-Fi standard present in your devices.

The Wi-Fi Alliance will also be moving beyond hardware for this system to reflect. This means if you connect your device to Wi-Fi networks in the future, you will be shown if you are connected to Wi-Fi 1, Wi-Fi 2 and so on. Based on this you can choose to connect to the best network easily.

Now the real reason why the Wi-Fi Alliance came up with this new naming system was to introduce Wi-Fi 802.11ax or as it will be called Wi-Fi 6.

“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,” said Edgar Figueroa, president and CEO of Wi-Fi Alliance. “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.”