With every new generation of technology, companies rush to label theirs as the one that is high-speed: high-speed USB, high-speed Internet or high-speed Ethernet. When combined with wireless jargon, differentiating one connection technology from another becomes a challenge. Wireless, high-speed Ethernet and Wi-Fi are not the same, but they share select qualities.
In the early days of wireless technology, there were a number of different standards. Deploying wireless access solutions was difficult because companies could never be sure if one standard would work with another. Through this mess, the Wi-Fi Alliance was formed. This consortium didn't develop Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers technical standards but instead certified wireless products to meet a certain standard of quality and interoperability. As products rushed to adopt this certification, people began to regard all wireless technology broadly as Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi-certified products bear the alliance logo, a now easily-recognized logo that simply says “Wi-Fi.”
Wi-Fi and Wireless
Wireless has similarly become a confusing term when compared against Wi-Fi. As Wi-Fi has now become synonymous with local area wireless standards, “wireless” implies a cellular-based connection as well as those connections built on the 802.11 standard. The IEEE 802.11 standard defines how wireless local area networks communicate. Cellular wireless operates on a different set of standards than 802.11, so it's not the same as Wi-Fi.
Ethernet and Wireless
If Wi-Fi were the child, wireless would be the dad and Ethernet would be the grandfather; little in common, but one would not exist without the other. High-speed Ethernet typically refers to wired communication. The Ethernet standard itself, devised in Xerox labs in the late 1970’s, broadly defines how computers within a local network talk to each other. Version 802.11 is considered a wireless Ethernet standard, while wired Ethernet standards are defined under IEEE 802.1. Though some of the highly-technical aspects of Ethernet, such as framing standards, are shared between high-speed Ethernet and wireless Ethernet standards, the two otherwise have little in common.
Speed is relative between the three standards. There is no high-speed Ethernet standard, only Fast Ethernet, which runs at 100 megabits per second, or Mbps. Wireless Ethernet standards vary: 802.11g, for example, operates at 54Mbps, a significant improvement of its 11Mbps predecessor, 802.11b. Today, 802.11n operates at up to 300Mbps, faster than Fast Ethernet. But today many homes and business utilize gigabit Ethernet in their wiring setups, which, as the name implies, operates at 1,000Mbps.
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