Wi-Fi Alliance Simplifies Things With Version Numbers

[Guest]

The Wi-Fi Alliance is doing away with the official 802.11n/ac/ax designations in favor of the much easier to understand Wi-Fi 4, 5 and 6 version numbers.

Wi-Fi Alliance Simplifies Things With Version Numbers : Read more

 

[tom10167]

I like it. The letters had no real significance, it should have happened ages ago.

Plus, it'll be nice to see product descriptions no longer being forced to write "Supports 802.11AC, 802.11N, 802.11G and of course that archaic 802.11b and even that 802.11a that nobody ever used."

 

[Math Geek]

sounds good to me as well. something like wifi 6/1600 would be rather easy to understand that it's the 6th gen wifi and can handle speeds up to 1600 mb/s.

of course i did not have any issues with b/g/n/ac and so on either

 

[compprob237]

"(Apparently with Wi-Fi, much like the original Star Wars trilogy, you don't need to worry about what came before versions 4-6.)"

Does that also mean that 7 will be meh and 8 will be awful?

 

[beoza]

Not sure if I like this or not. Part of me says if it ain't broke don't fix it, and the other part can see the advantages for the less tech savvy folks out there. I will give them credit for trying to simplify things before it gets too out of hand. It's not near as confusing as CPU and GPU naming conventions in recent years.

 

[derekullo]

If you watch WIFI 5 backwards, it's about a magical Wifi Doctor who reattaches headers and forwards packets to a place far, far away.

 

[vern72]

I like the new convention if it can be considered a "marketing name" then have the old convention as its formal, technical name

 

[Solandri]

sounds good to me as well. something like wifi 6/1600 would be rather easy to understand that it's the 6th gen wifi and can handle speeds up to 1600 mb/s.

That's actually another problem they still need to deal with. When you buy an AC1900 router, it's not really capable of 1900 Mbps. It's typically 1300 Mbps on the 5 Ghz band, 600 Mbps on the 2.4 Ghz band.

Unless your computer has got two separate wireless cards using some sort of channel bonding, you're never gonna get 1900 Mbps from that router to a single device. But some marketing dweeb saw 1300 Mbps @ 5 GHz and 600 Mbps @ 2.4 Ghz, and since 1900 > 1300 or 600, they decided to just add the two together to create a meaningless 1900 marketing number to plaster on the box. Once one company started doing it, all the other companies accurately labeling their boxes as 1300 @ 5 Ghz, 600 @ 2.4 Ghz had to follow or lose sales to naive buyers thinking 1900 > 1300.

 

[velocityg4]

I'm just waiting for all the threads.
- My new computer has WiFi 5. Will it work with my 802.11ac router? Should I buy a new one?
- Should I buy this WiFi 5 or 802.11ac router?
- My new computer and router are WiFi 5. When it connects my computer says 802.11ac is being used. How do I force it to connect to WiFi 5?... Then after much argument that they are the exact same thing and citing multiple articles they'll keep insisting it is slower than it should be.

 

[cryoburner]

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.

Unless they want to know what generation all of their existing wireless equipment from the last couple decades belongs to, since it's still going to be using the 802.11 numbers. I guess people are expected to buy all new wi-fi 6 hardware to be updated to the new naming scheme.

They likely did this to make previous generations sound more outdated than they really are. For most people, the benefits of Wi-fi 6 will likely be minimal compared to existing wireless hardware with support for 802.11n/ac.