Wi-Fi 6 was a rename, not a release

Generation numbers arrived in 2018, years after the standards they described — because the marketing had finally broken.

A numbering system invented after the fact

By 2018, the Wi-Fi Alliance had a problem it had made for itself. The amendment numbering IEEE used internally — 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, 802.11ac — had leaked into product boxes, retail shelves and press releases, and nobody outside the standards community could decode it. A router labelled 802.11ac Wave 2 told a buyer almost nothing without prior knowledge of the sequence.

The Alliance's solution was to apply generation numbers retroactively, mapping the existing amendments onto a clean integer series: 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and the then-in-progress 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. The rename was announced in October 2018, well before 802.11ax was ratified — that came in February 2021. The number preceded the standard.

Earlier amendments were left without official generation names. 802.11a and 802.11g, which together defined the 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz branches of the first useful generation, were simply grandfathered out of the sequence. Wi-Fi 1, 2 and 3 appear in some informal timelines but were never formally assigned by the Alliance.

The rename also introduced a new certification logo programme, giving device manufacturers small numbered badges to place on packaging. This mattered commercially: a buyer could compare Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 5 without needing to remember that "ac" preceded "ax" in the alphabet or what either amendment number signified.

Technically, Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) carried genuine advances over 802.11ac — OFDMA scheduling, improved MU-MIMO, target wake time for battery-constrained devices, and better behaviour in dense environments. Those features were real. But the generation label arrived as a branding exercise, not as a technical milestone. The standard body is IEEE; the certification body is the Alliance; and the number you see on a box is the Alliance's work, timed to market needs rather than to ballot closure.

The rename established a durable convention. Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 followed the same naming logic, with the Alliance controlling what the public calls a standard that IEEE actually wrote.

This mattered commercially: a buyer could compare Wi-Fi 6 to Wi-Fi 5 without needing to remember that "ac" preceded "ax" in the alphabet or what either amendment number signified.

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The rest of in order, with dates

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• TimelineLTE, and the end of the circuitLTE moved cellular to an all-IP core, which is the change that made voice a service on the data network rather than the other way round.
• TimelineWi-Fi 7 and the width problemWi-Fi 7's widest channels need spectrum that not every regulator has released, so the same product performs differently by country.