if you connect to a network at work or at home then you're probably very familiar with wireless networks you may have also noticed that no matter where you go with your wireless device and whatever Network you connect to you always seem to have the required connectivity this is because there is an international standard for wireless network that's managed by The Institute of electrical and electronics Engineers or the i e the i e standard for wireless networks is in their standards committee for the 802 series specifically 802.11 so anytime you hear anyone mention 802.11 they're referring to the standards associated with wireless networks another interesting characteristic of wireless networks is that they are constantly evolving and constantly changing so you'll want to check in with the it e standards to see which type of wireless network you're using there's another organization involved with wireless networking called the wifi Alliance and you'll notice there is a Wi-Fi trademark logo on every device that the Wi-Fi Alliance has tested this ensures interoperability with the standards that are set by the i e in the past we used to refer to these wireless networks with their standards name for example 802.11b or 802.11 ax we've recently added additional names to these standards to make them a little easier to understand for everyone who's connecting to these wireless networks for example if you're using the six G generation of Wi-Fi networks then you're connecting to an 802.11 ax network but we also refer to this network as wii6 this chart shows a list of all of the major Wi-Fi standards listed by their 802.11 name I've also included the new generational name for those standards the frequencies they happen to use and the maximum theoretical link rate for each of those standards the first three of these standards 802.11 a B and G are rarely used today and we did not formally set a generation name to those although you could colloquially refer to these as Wi-Fi 1 Wi-Fi 2 and Wi-Fi 3 the newer standards of Wi-Fi 4 through Wi-Fi 7 are covered through the standards of 802.11n through 802.11 be you'll also notice there's a difference on the type of frequencies that are used for each of these standards and most of these refer to the 2.4 GHz the 5 GHz and the 6 GHz ranges there are a number of differences on how these Wireless standards can be implemented there might be a different number of antennas or a different number of radios and that accounts for the differences in the theoretical link rates that you see in this final column notice as we've introduced newer standards of wireless networks that we've also increased the overall link rate of those networks but we use more than our local 802.11 networks for wireless networking if you have a mobile phone or mobile tablet then you're probably using a wireless providers Network that uses 4G LTE or 5G Technologies LTE stands for long-term Evolution it is what we refer to as the 4G technology and it was a conversion between different standards of GSM and CDMA into a single standard that every provider can use these 4G networks supported download rates of approximately 150 megabits per second and the improved version of LTE which is LTE Advanced or LTE supports download rates that double that to 300 megabits per second a more modern version of mobile networking is the 5G networking that was introduced in 2020 this greatly improve the performance of wireless mobile networks and with the right configuration the goal will be to have 10 gbits per second as the overall throughput and in other implementations you may see more reasonable speeds such as 100 to 900 100 megabits per second 5G has dramatically changed the way we look at mobile connectivity especially since we're now able to get similar bandwidths over our mobile providers that we currently have with wired Network providers in our own homes this also means that we're able to greatly increase the size of our internet of things or iot footprint because now bandwidth is no longer a constraint this means we can transfer much more data over a shorter period of time we can receive notifications much faster than we could in the past and because we can transfer more data we can process more of that data in the cloud there may be times when an organization might have a remote location that is not accessible through any type of traditional internet connectivity for that reason we may want to use a non-terrestrial form of connectivity known as satellite networking this means that we can add a satellite dish to a location and begin sending and receiving data from the satellite this obviously adds additional cost and complexity and the speeds of satellite networking although reasonable are not as fast as those we might have for traditional terrestrial based networking for example satellite networking can commonly provide you with 100 megabits down and 5 megabits up this means that if you have a remote site that has no other way to communicate you can add a satellite dish to the roof and begin communicating directly to the internet as you can imagine there is a delay as information is sent into space and back down to Earth again traditional satellite networking provided 250 milliseconds up and 250 milliseconds down so each conversation to and from the satellite took approximately half a second newer Technologies such as starlink advertises a 40 millisecond latency and they're working to decrease that down to 20 milliseconds another challenge with satellite networking is that it requires a direct line of sight to the satellite that's in orbit above the Earth this means means if anything does get between the satellite receiver and the satellite then we may have a decrease of performance or lose connectivity altogether for example if a thunderstorm was to come through we would suffer through what we call Rain fade where we lose connectivity while that storm is going over in those situations it may be necessary to wait for the storm to blow through or we may have other forms of connectivity that we might use when a storm is currently active