How many kinds of Wi-Fi are there?

In recent years, Wi-Fi has exploded with all sorts of new features and standards. While these features make life much easier, all of the lingo surrounding the new features can be quite overwhelming. With 802.11a,b,n,g,ac and now ax appearing on tech packaging, purchasing a new device can be a little overwhelming. There are many technical details that go with each of the letters, but the biggest thing to know is that each letter mostly has to do with speed.

Wifi "speed" is measured in 2 main ways. The first way that we think of is in gigahertz. Gigahertz is just an easier way of saying "1,000,000,000 times per second." When you see 2.4GHz or 5GHz, that really means that there is an electrical wave that is moving up and down at 5 billion times per second. With this basic understanding, one might make the assumption that "more gigahertz means more better," however, this is not totally true. The biggest differences between the two are 2.4GHz has a much slower transmission speed (explained later), but can travel much further, and 5GHz is much faster but cannot travel as far or as well through walls.

The other way of measuring speed is in bps, which is bits per second. A 2.4GHz connection is capable of supporting up to 600 Megabits per second, whereas a 5GHz connection is capable of supporting up to 1300 Megabits per second.

I mentioned a lot of letters earlier in this post, and luckily most of them are becoming irrelevant. You may still see 802.11B/G/N on some packaging, but with the new 802.11ax protocol, the formal name is going away. The new buzz word that you will see on packaging is "Wi-Fi 6." Wi-Fi 6 is currently the fastest protocol available and the full capabilities are only supported by newer devices. However, there is some backwards compatibility, meaning if you have a laptop with Wi-Fi 6, it will  work with Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), but the data transmission will not be at Wi-Fi 6 speeds.

At this point in the article, you're probably thinking "Great. A whole bunch of information, but I don't see the differences on the day to day." I understand that, but this knowledge helps when you have a device, like a smart plug made 7 years ago, that does not support 5ghz wifi and you're wondering why you cannot connect it to the internet even though you can see the network on your phone. For the most part, Harding's network operates on the 5GHz band, making some of the devices that only use 2.4GHz band not function properly. If this is the case, please reach out to us and we will look into a potential solution for you.