Wireless Home Networking Simplified

802.11a

In 1999, two years after the original standard was developed, the IEEE published the standards for revisions A and B, both of which were different “flavors” of the original wireless standard. Wireless standard A was the faster of the two revised wireless types. It was a bit more costly to develop and therefore had much slower adoption than the B standard, which was used by most of the companies making wireless devices for home networking. Because of this, many people think that standard B came out before standard A. Given the fact that engineers develop these standards, that assumption is just silly. (If you are wondering, the convention is to use lowercase letters with 802.11 and uppercase letters when alone, for example, 802.11a and ...