The 802.11 Standards

Taking off from what you learned in Chapter 1, “Introduction to Networks,” wireless networking has its own 802 standards group—remember, Ethernet’s committee is 802.3. Wireless starts with 802.11, and there are various other up-and-coming standard groups as well, like 802.16 and 802.20. And even cellular networks are becoming huge players in our wireless experience. But for now, we’re going to concentrate on the 802.11 standards committee and subcommittees.

IEEE 802.11 was the first, original standardized WLAN at 1Mbps and 2Mbps. It runs in the 2.4GHz radio frequency. It was ratified in 1997, although we didn’t see many products pop up until around 1999 when 802.11b was introduced. All the committees listed in Table 12-2 made amendments to the original 802.11 standard except for 802.11f and 802.11t, which produced stand-alone documents.