It's arguable whether the latest generation of wireless products upholds the 802.11 standard hammered out by the (www.ieee.org) Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, usually pronounced "I triple-E"). What is certain is that every manufacturer of these products claims to be 802.11-compliant.
What is an 802 standard?
The IEEE's 802 series of standards covers network communications. For example, agreed-upon standards for Ethernet and Token-Ring networks can be found in that list:
- 802.1h covers translational bridging (i.e., changing frames
- 802.2 covers data frames
- 802.3 covers Ethernet
- 802.5 covers Token Ring
- 802.6 covers metropolitan area networks (networks wider than a LAN but narrower than a WAN), but never went into widespread practice
- 802.9a covers Ethernet multimedia
- 802.10 covers Ethernet security
802.11 is a standard for wireless LANs, but only for those that operate in the relatively narrow 2.400-to-2.483-GHz frequency range and at the relatively slow data rate of 2 Mbits per second. It includes both hub-based and peer-to-peer capabilities.
According to O'Reilly's (www.ora.com/catalog/dcterms/)Dictionary of PC Hardware and Data Communication Terms, written before the standard was completed, "The physical layer options will
likely include direct-sequence spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping spread-spectrum, narrowband microwave and infrared transmission."
All of this was eventually included. The physical-layer options, however, are not interoperable, which means future wireless standards may be inevitable.