Ĩ02.11b and 802.11g use the 2.4- GHz ISM band, operating in the United States under Part 15 of the U.S. Other standards in the family (c–f, h, j) are service amendments that are used to extend the current scope of the existing standard, which amendments may also include corrections to a previous specification. The 802.11 protocol family employs carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance whereby equipment listens to a channel for other users (including non 802.11 users) before transmitting each frame (some use the term "packet", which may be ambiguous: "frame" is more technically correct).Ĩ02.11-1997 was the first wireless networking standard in the family, but 802.11b was the first widely accepted one, followed by 802.11a, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac.
The 802.11 family consists of a series of half-duplex over-the-air modulation techniques that use the same basic protocol. 6.2 Regulatory domains and legal compliance.6.1 Channel spacing within the 2.4 GHz band.5 Common misunderstandings about achievable throughput.The protocols are typically used in conjunction with IEEE 802.2, and are designed to interwork seamlessly with Ethernet, and are very often used to carry Internet Protocol traffic. Although IEEE 802.11 specifications list channels that might be used, the radio frequency spectrum availability allowed varies significantly by regulatory domain. IEEE 802.11 uses various frequencies including, but not limited to, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands. As a result, in the marketplace, each revision tends to become its own standard. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they concisely denote the capabilities of their products. The base version of the standard was released in 1997 and has had subsequent amendments. The standards are created and maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) LAN/ MAN Standards Committee ( IEEE 802).
IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires. The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards. IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. For comparison, this Netgear dual-band router from 2013 uses the "ac" standard, capable of transmitting 1900 Mbit/s (combined).