WiFi Timeline
1997:
- Start of standardization groups 802.11a for 5GHz (WiFi2)
and 802.11b (WiFi1) for 2.4GHz. Reason that WiFi1 is 11b and not 11a even
though 11a came in the market years later is that the vote to start 11a
happened just before the vote for 11b.
1998:
- 802.11b has 5 proposals from Harris (later
Intersil and Connexant), Lucent (now Agere), Micrilor (later acquired by
Proxim), Raytheon, and Alantro (later acquired by TI). Alantro and
Raytheon are eliminated first as they get only a few percent of the 58 voting
members present. Subsequently, the Lucent proposal is eliminated, which is
partly based on technical arguments (complexity, peak-to-average power
problem), but also on political arguments: there are many direct
competitors of Lucent amongst the voting members, as Lucent in these days
is selling end-products containing its own chips. Hence, it competes with
both chip vendors and card manufacturers, in contrast to Micrilor and
Harris that just want to sell chips. With two proposals left, Micrilor
wins the next round with 50% of the votes. However, as the 802.11b voting
rules require the winning proposal to have more than 50% of the votes,
there is a procedural deadlock. Lucent and Harris start talking how to
come up with a compromise proposal to break this deadlock. Richard van Nee
proposes to use the CCK codes that he published in 1996 for use in OFDM
but that also have some nice properties when used as single carrier codes
to make an 11Mbps 11b data rate. Mark webster from Harris selects a subset
of the 11Mbps codes to make a 5.5Mbps fallback rate with best possible
delay spread robustness. This joint Lucent-Harris proposal is accepted in
July 1998 as the basis for the new 802.11b standard.
- 802.11a has 5 proposals from Lucent, NTT,
Breezecom, NEC, and RadioLAN. Richard van Nee makes the Lucent OFDM-based
proposal and later merges with NTT to create one joint proposal. The
802.11a selection procedure is less politically biased than 802.11b, as
most parties realize that the immediate market need will be for 802.11b
rather than 802.11a. The main battle in 802.11a is between single-carrier
and multi-carrier, which is finally won by the multi-carrier joint
Lucent-NTT proposal in July 1998.
1999:
- Both 802.11a and 802.11b standards are finalized.
- WiFi Alliance (then called Weca) is founded in
August 1999 by 6 companies
- Apple launches the Airport and the IBook with
build-in 802.11b card. The client card costs only $99, which is an order
of magnitude lower than the price of wireless LAN cards in 1998. This
event marks the start of the wireless LAN mass market.
2000:
- Richard and Ramjee Prasad from CPK Denmark write
the first book on OFDM with emphasis on 802.11a which is a well known
reference in the wireless LAN industry.
- Greg, VK, Richard, Geert and other cofounders
come together and decide to start a new company to build a true MIMO-OFDM
wireless LAN product including all current 802.11 standards plus enhanced
rates. Airgo Networks (initially named Woodside Networks) starts early
2001. One of the major new technologies developed in the early phase of
Airgo are optimum and near-optimum MIMO decoding techniques that make it
possible to use the full potential of MIMO-OFDM. Optimum MIMO decoding was
considered too complex and impractical before Airgo demonstrated that it
could be done.
2002:
- IEEE802.11 starts the High Throughput Study Group
based on initial presentations from Airgo Networks. This study group
evolves into the 802.11n (WiFi4) Task Group in 2003.
2003:
- 802.11g standard finalized, which essentially
brings 802.11a modulation into the 2.4 GHz band.
- Airgo announces first MIMO-OFDM wireless LAN
products, capable of doubling the data rate relative to 802.11a in the
same 20MHz channel using 2 spatial streams. The product is backward
compatible with 802.11a/b, providing a greatly improved range for these
legacy rates.
2004:
- First Airgo-based MIMO-OFDM products sold by
Belkin.
2005:
- Airgo introduces MIMO-OFDM rates up to 240Mbps in
a 40MHz channel.
2006:
- Airgo acquired by Qualcomm
2009:
- 802.11n ratified. 802.11n
- Qualcomm announces the first 4-stream wireless
LAN chipset, delivering 600Mbps in a 40MHz channel.
- 802.11ac Task Group starts working on higher
throughput extensions, using Multi-User MIMO and other performance
enhancing techniques. The highest data rates in this new standard are
6.933Gbps.
2012:
2017:
- Qualcomm announces the first 802.11ax (WiFi6) chips