The 802.11 Standards
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 standards
groups as well, such as for 802.16 and 802.20. And there’s no doubt that cellular networks
will become huge players in our wireless future. But for now, I’ll 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 and was ratified in 1997 even though we didn’t see many products
pop up until around 1999 when 802.11b was introduced. All the committees listed in
Table 9.2 are amendments to the original 802.11 standard except for 802.11F and 802.11T,
which are both stand-alone documents.