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Comment by RL_Quine | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate that they lasted a year before muddying the already foggy "wifi 6" branding by introducing "wifi 6e".

    802.11
    802.11a  
    802.11b 
    802.11g
    802.11-2007
    802.11n
    802.11-2012
    802.11ac
    802.11af

This is too confusing for consumers, lets drop the letter scheme.

    Wifi 6. 
    Wifi 6E

Hold up.

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This is why we should let Apple name everything.

  Wifi Mesquite
  Wifi Mistletoe
  Wifi Kangaroo Rat
  Wifi Roadrunner
  Wifi Rattlesnake
  Wifi Great Horned Owl

That way it's easy to keep track because we just follow the food chain. And with Apple in charge, it will be instinctive to know that Mac OS X Leopard is incompatible with Wifi Minnesota Big Game Hunter Dentist.

Or!

WiFi

WiFi 2

WiFi 3

New WiFi

WiFi

  Wifi
  Wifi 3G
  Wifi 3GS
  Wifi 4
  Wifi 4S
  Wifi 5
  Wifi 5C
  Wifi 5S
  Wifi 5SE

Smells like Apple is a member of the Wifi Alliance.

The Wi-Fi

2 Wi 2 Fi

The Wi-Fi: Tokyo Drift

WiFi

WiFive

Wifi 6

Fi 7

The Fate of the Fi

WiFi Presents: Facebook & Google

I laughed way too hard at this.

I laughed way too furiously at this.

Joke was a bit too fast for my taste :D

Please leave the low-effort puns at reddit, they already trashed the comments section over there, don't bring it here.

But don’t forget that the WiFi Tokyo Drift version actually fits in between two later versions and it’s up to you to figure out where by carefully examining which characters are present in the documentation of each version.

That's what 802.11a was about.

You forgot some, though.

WiFi 6: Second Edition

WiFi Classic Edition

2 Wi 2 Fi: 2 (who knows, maybe they even make this a full trilogy)

WiFi 2: Electric Boogaloo

Some Microsoft-style edgelord naming:

WiFi

WiFi 360

WiFi One

WiFi One X

WiFi Series X

WiFi X Is The Most Futuristic Letter Known To Man

WiFi XXX

WiFi Look at all those X’s

Or maybe:

WiFi

WiFi XP

WiFi XP Ultimate

WiFi Extreme X

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi 2

Wi-Fi 3

Wi-Fi 4: Modern Internet

Wi-Fi: World Connected

Wi-Fi: Modern Internet 2

Wi-Fi: Dev Ops

Wi-Fi: Modern Internet 3

Wi-Fi: Dev Ops II

Wi-Fi: Packet-loss

Wi-Fi: Advanced Internet

Wi-Fi: Dev Ops III

Wi-Fi: Infinite Internet

Wi-Fi: WAN

Wi-Fi: Dev Ops 4

Wi-Fi: Modern Internet

Naming can be hard when a new product is not a direct replacement/upgrade of the previous one but more of a fork which might include a premium/cheap version.

Firefox should join in and we should go straight to

Wifi 48

WiFi Pro

Sticking to incrementing integer major revision may not be as much fun, it makes ordering much easier. Case in point, a roadrunner hunting a rattlesnake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLspcdm0Bs

I own some Apple hardware but I couldn't tell you the order of OSX/MacOS releases off the top of my head. It's something only brand enthusiasts memorize, while every school child learns the ordering of integers.

To be fair, the IEEE standards are very easy to order, the letters sort the same way excel columns do: a-z, followed by aa-az, then ba-bz, etc. Sure, they skip most of the letters and I'm not sure if the ordering is entirely intentional, but so far it works.

> Sure, they skip most of the letters

Actually, they skip just a couple of letters, the ones which can easily be confused with other letters. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/802.11#Standards_and_amendme... for a full list. And yes, the letters are alocated in order.

It's just that they also use letters for clarifications, incremental updates, and in a couple cases tangential committee work, so 802.11 skips so many letters not because they weren't documents but because they were documents that didn't spawn a "new standard" outright. Some of the "in between" letters are used for interesting things, and/or are useful stepping stones in seeing the evolution of the standards that made it to "consumer adoption".

(Hence why it was maybe smart of the Wi-Fi Alliance to disambiguate IEEE procedure from marketing names for consumers, but also why they don't seem to be having much more luck with it than say the marketing names of cellular networks, because standards don't evolve "linearly".)

But mac os versions all have numbers that go along with them in addition to the name. It's the same system used by the Linux Kernel (i.e. 5.2 / Bobtail Squid), Ubuntu (18.04 / Bionic Beaver), and many other pieces of software. Most of the time the numbers are more useful, but there are occasions where having a non-numeric designation is helpful.

Apple's real naming sin is that they don't enumerate all of their hardware as they do with the iPhone.

But as long as we are talking about silly naming, this is always my favorite criticism: http://www.secretgeek.net/ex_ms

Eh, for their Macs Apple follows just a more verbose version of Ubuntu's scheme by versioning with dates. MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)

That’s not true, if you ever open about this Mac - you’ll see the real name and model code like “MacBook 10,9 A1358”

That’s not true

It is absolutely true. And it is both.

On the machine I'm using right now, opening About This Mac shows "iMac (21.5-inch, Late 2013)."

The identifier you're talking about can only then be reached by clicking System Report... and looking under Model Identifier, where it is listed as "iMac14,1."

That link is hilarious!

I miss Wifi Snow Roadrunner

I think they should turn it over to the people at the Debian project who name every release for a toy story character. Old list I've pasted here, buster is now a stable release.

1.1 Buzz 1996-06-17 Buzz Lightyear

1.2 Rex 1996-12-12 Rex (the T-Rex)

1.3 Bo 1997-06-05 Bo Peep

2.0 Hamm 1998-07-24 Hamm (the pig)

2.1 Slink 1999-03-09 Slinky Dog

2.2 Potato 2000-08-15 Mr Potato Head

3.0 Woody 2002-07-19 Woody the cowboy

3.1 Sarge 2005-06-06 Sarge from the Bucket O’ Soldiers

4.0 Etch 2007-04-08 Etch, the Etch-A-Sketch

5.0 Lenny 2009-02-14 Lenny, the binoculars

6.0 Squeeze 2011-02-06 Squeeze toy aliens

7 Wheezy 2013-05-04 Wheezy the penguin

8 Jessie 2015-04-26 Jessie the cowgirl

9 Stretch 2017-06-17 Rubber octopus from Toy Story 3

10 Buster not yet released Andy’s pet dog

11 Bullseye Not yet released Woody’s horse

Sid "unstable" The next door neighbour

... and, someday, "bookworm"!

Forky?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forky

https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBookworm

> Sid "unstable" The next door neighbour

Still In Development

It is possible for something to intentionally have a double meaning.

Given the overall naming convention I'd actually hazzard a guess that Sid the ToyStory character was the initial reason for the name and Still In Development is a backronym.

I think it was a backronym, but it was referred to when I first used Debian in 2000 so it's hardly new

Sid, aka the kid who broke toys

Buster was released in July 2019

They haven’t all been great though. How one says ‘X’ in the Apple ecosystem has always been trouble, and they seem to repeatedly fall into that trap. There is also the weird pleuralisation issues they have (iPhones 7? iPhone 7s? How do you pleuralise the iPhone 7S?). Some of the releases shared a name too, like Mountain Lion and High Sierra (which were great so are forgiven).

Huh? Always ten, 7Ss (seven esses... ese), and just like S those mean minor releases based on a previous major, just with software not hardware.

If you ask people what various Apple things are called you won’t get the X pronounced as 10. Xcode comes to mind too.

as a developer for only the last 4ish years I never even put together that the X in Xcode had anything to do with the X in OSX

The problem is then you get to this:

  WiFi Terminator Model 101

And all hell breaks loose because of the circular dependencies. Yes, they could skip it and just go with

  Wifi John Connor

But that won’t satisfy anyone.

——

Great post, btw !

WiFi 6

Wifi 6 Pro

Wifi 6 Pro Max

It gets better, though:

""" Please note:

In this story, we discuss 5 GHz and 6 GHz, which are frequency bands, as well as the wireless standards 5G and Wi-Fi 6.

The frequency ranges may sound like they are related to the wireless standards, but the terminology similarity is a coincidence. """

The post also talks about "WiFi 4" and "WiFi 5", which were new terms to me. It turns out "WiFi 4" is back naming for 802.11n, "WiFi 5" is 802.11ac.

So you can have Wifi 4 2.4GHz, WiFi 4 5GHz, and WiFi 5 5Ghz, WiFi 6 5GHz and Wifi 6 6GHz? Something like that.

I'd rather they just use the years the standards were ratified... at least that would be both monotonic and obvious while not risking confusion with the frequency.

Probably unpalatable to industry. Do you imagine ASUS would want their newest 2020 router to only be Wifi 2018?

Consumers that need to know or care can be taught.

The other half or more of the market already doesn't understand the existing versioning scheme. If you print the version in small print on the back of the box, they'll be no worse off. Or simply elide the first two digits and they won't know it's a year-based scheme.

And who's to say they can't do a yearly release cadence? WiFi 20, WiFi 21, ...

I propose using a 3 digit date, no one will even realize if they aren't a tech person.

Our 2020 router supports wifi 018

It can be done in the same way that specifications for consumer electronics currently work. This router supports WiFi Hyper-Speed 5 Super Tough Technology with Ultra Frequency Crystals (R) for enhanced frequency modulation GAMING EDITION ULTIMATE FATALITY RGB.

The rise of this sort of branding is very intentionally to make comparison possible, as you don't really know anything about the Ultra Frequency Crystals and why their competitor doesn't have them, just buy whichever ones have flames and a dragon on the box and it'll work itself out.

The auto industry deals with this by assigning cars a "model year" which is the year after the calendar year in which they start being sold, thus you can buy 2021 cars in 2020.

Monotonic version numbering is the way to go, and years are the most consistent and best understood mechanism for something with a release cadence such as WiFi or a language spec.

We should adopt this as an industry.

ECMAScript does this (ECAMScript 2015, 2017, 2018, etc) and I also really like it.

Fortran has been doing it longer.. Fortran 66, 77, 90, 95, 2003, 2008, 2018. It really is a very helpful approach.

It also gives an indication of whether two things were produced around the same time or not. (Eg. You'd know that Windows 2015 probably wouldn't support WiFi 2019 without support being added)

Now that's just brilliant. It hasn't seen wide enough adoption for this to happen yet, but imagine all the USB standards and processors and whatnot did the same.

That's just so simple it's genius.

"That 2020 motherboard won't run USB 2025"

We really need this.

Please Intel, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc. folks reading this. Please.

Those firms don't have much control of the rate technology is adopted.

Look at how slow USB-C has been to come on. Look at how 802.11ax has gone nowhere. Or how Intel has been dragging its feet with PCIe4.

Absolutely this. “Hey, this 2025 motherboard runs USB 2020 right?” “Nope!”

> Look at how 802.11ax has gone nowhere

802.11ax is WiFi 6. We can assume it will get somewhere once it gets a fully fledged launch.

It's also really nice for convincing people that things are out of date. It is a lot easier to defend targeting "ANSI C" than it is to defend targeting "C89", even though it shouldn't be.

Except that your 2025 motherboard will run USB 2025, even though it’s the same as USB 2020. The marketing people just didn’t want to write USB 2020 on there.

But since USB won’t actually Change until 2030 it doesn’t matter, right?

someone put a website to advocate something like this to replace semver, forgot the url though

> someone put a website to advocate something like this to replace semver, forgot the url though

It's probably CalVer: https://calver.org/

As other commenters have said though, manufacturers probably don't want consumers to have a good idea of just how obsolete their equipment is. The current a|c|b|g|n alphabet soup is working out just fine for selling lots of equipment.

Also, there are likely to be actual manufacturing and engineering reasons why Wifi 2021 will only become widely available during 2024, and those are hard to get across to consumers too.

> Monotonic version numbering is the way to go, and years are the most consistent and best understood mechanism [...]. We should adopt this as an industry.

Absolutely agreed.

In the interest of efficiency, we should probably also truncate it to fewer digits.

Perhaps 2.

Since we're in the first quarter of a new century, this won't cause an issue for a long time.

I have fond memories from the mid nineties of a compiled xBase language that did this, their dominant version was Clipper Summer'87 — their last year numbered version, their next version was 5.0 and was so bad they lost most of their market advantage — in the mid nineties talking about a product called Summer'87 sounded really bad to me, humorously this was when Microsoft moved from a numeric scheme to years, which itself only lasted from 95-2000 (longer for server releases of course)

> Microsoft moved from a numeric scheme to years, which itself only lasted from 95-2000 (longer for server releases of course)

Their commitment to it even for servers is only half-hearted.

    Windows Server 2003 (April 2003)
    Windows Server 2003 R2 (December 2005)
    Windows Server 2008 (February 2008)
    Windows Server 2008 R2 (October 2009)
    Windows Server 2012 (September 2012)
    Windows Server 2012 R2 (October 2013)
    Windows Server 2016 (September 2016)
    Windows Server 2019 (October 2018)

I'd rather they just use the years the standards were ratified

Worked for Microsoft... for a while.

And then later, lazy programmers forced it to skip Windows 9.

People ruin everything.

> People ruin everything.

'Marketeers' ruin everything.

It's my understanding that the reason "Windows 9" was skipped was technical, not marketing.

I read (I think on HN) that lazy programmers would test whether the environment was Windows 95 through 98 by only checking for "Win9" or something similar, rather than a list of strings. Thus, if Microsoft released an actual "Win9," many programs would think they were running on Windows 95.

To name and shame at least one example, such code was included in some versions of the Java Development Kit itself and could be found in easy Google code searches at least at the time Microsoft skipped Windows 9.

Microsoft and Apple and others also prefer to skip 9 for the international marketing reason that 9 is a very evil number by superstition in most of Asia, like how some of the west believes 13 to be unlucky and things like elevators tend to skip 13 in the US/Europe.

That works for the version but tells you very little about what frequencies are supported. And it's the complication of frequencies that's hard here, not figuring out that wifi 6 comes between 5 and 7.

WiFi 6 works on 2.4 as well.

Which is one of the major benefits of it! It brings all the goodies back to 2.4ghz.

Hah...you can't even get rid of the possibility of confusion by switching to wavelength instead of frequency to talk about the bands.

5 GHz is 6 cm, and 6 GHz is 5 cm, and so using wavelength would probably actually be more confusing.

> 802.11af

You have to admire the poetry that 802 doesn't just go to 11 but it's as 11 AF!

Genius.

Telecommunications engineers produce the worst naming schemes and acronyms of anyone, anywhere.

Any cellular document is a mishmash of alphabet soup: UTRAN, UMTS, PS-CN, SGSN, RNC, RNS, eNodeB, EPC, MME, S-GW, X2-AP, S1, GTP-U, HSDPA, HSUPA, RRC, PDCP, RLC, OFDM, MU-MIMO, and on and on ad infinitum.

You'd think the marketing people would at least get the public-facing stuff right, but they've likely been tainted by association with the engineers.

They have though. They added 2G/3G/4G/5G (though some American ISPs like to call stuff the next G even if it doesn't qualify).

There's also WiFi and now WiFi 1-6 (the F is just dumb) and Bluetooth 1-5.

OFDM and MU-MIMO aren't user facing technologies, they can be applied in any wireless standard really. Just because router manufacturers put stickers on their boxes doesn't make the technology customer facing.

Same with the protocols underlying the cellular industry. For all the engineers care, the people just call it by their Gs and be done with it. Cell phone manufacturers tried to advertise with specific technology names because "3G but slightly faster" doesn't sell well. Then the 4G debacle happened where LTE didn't even qualify to be called 4G at first except due to a technicality and now that LTE Advanced is available, which finally is fast enough to be called 4G according to the specification, people are already starting to call it 5G.

I blame the marketeers for ruining any consumer facing schemes by their drive to have the biggest number the first no matter what. As long as people like that end up naming things, we'll never have concise naming schemes for consumers as all simplification efforts are ruined by trying to grab a quick buck.

What debacle? As I recall, LTE was the actual 4G tech because, well, it was a new generation after all the 3G ones. The only debacle I remember was that some carriers decided to call HSPA+ 4G for marketing reasons.

Well, according to the original design specification for the 4G name, the standard had to support a certain throughput in rest (I believe it was 1Gbps) and a certain throughput while moving at a certain speed (something like 100mbps at 100km/h). LTE failed to reach the 1gbps threshold but managed to get the high speed while moving so it was basically declared "4G enough" and people just accepted LTE as 4G. This is why the ITU now has definitions for 4G (LTE at the moment it started being marketed as 4G) and "True 4G" (4G technologies that actually pass the requirements for 4G such as LTE advanced, which AT&T now markets as "5G E" because screw consumers I suppose)

I recently worked in Telco, a long time before that I was in Research and Dev for the Military.

Telco has nothing on the military.

We had a database of TLA's[1] that was over 11,000 strong. Also everyone knew your TLA wasn't worth a damn unless it changed every three months or so.

[1] That's a 'Three Letter Acronym' - yes, there is a TLA for TLA.

> We had a database of TLA's[1] that was over 11,000 strong 26^3 = 17,576

So even back then you were already than halfway though the available space. Assuming they were all unique, which they wouldn't be. :)

Telecoms is a bit more rigorous when it comes to standards :-)

Back when I worked in that area our standards collection for x.400 /x.500 took up about 1/3 of a full hight cupboard

As hilarious as this sounds, it's actually not _that_ bad. It doesn't seem like 6E is a completely new standard so much as it is an existing standard being used on a new frequency band. In that respect, it wouldn't really make sense to call it "Wi-Fi 7", and the "add an arbitrary letter onto the end of the version number as an indicator of a different variant" naming scheme is already pretty well understood thanks to smartphones doing the same thing for years. (And Ethernet cables, come to think of it.)

I suppose they could have incremented the version number anyway just to avoid the need for that sort of awkward naming scheme, but I'm not sure if that'd be any less confusing. It'd be simpler sure, but also somewhat misleading. In any case, it's still way better than the previous scheme of using non-sequential letters of the alphabet as version numbers.

Have they considered names like Low speed, Full speed, High speed, and Super speed? They are already familiar to consumers who will understand them as well for wifi as they do for USB.

USB has to keep inventing new, slightly more impressive words for "fast".

ITU really got it bad here, having designated "Very High Frequency" at what we now consider pretty low frequency (<300MHz). Subsequently stacking on Ultra- Super- and Extremely-High Frequency bands before giving up at Terahertz.

That still leaves ridiculous, ludicrous, and plaid.

True, but considering how long ago the designation "high frequency" was made, it's understandable. AM was extremely low frequency (~1 MHz), but that was what they were comparing against when they started using higher frequency bands.

AM = amplitude modulation (as opposed to frequency modulation). It has nothing to do with a specific frequency range.

In the United States for example, AM is commonly used from ~150khz all the way up into the low hundreds of megahertz. As an example, all aircraft transmissions in the US are AM and are in the ~120-130Mhz range.

I’m pretty sure they meant AM radio which is around 1.5 MHz and below.

AM radio stations in the US are from 530Khz to 1700Khz, so possible. If so, then calling them “extremely low frequency” is a bit of a misnomer, as that band is called “medium frequency” or MF for short. The actual ELF band is 3-30hz, 4+ orders of magnitude lower frequency, and is mostly only used for submarine communication as most higher frequency signals are filtered by water.

I thought that was obvious, yes.

My point is that the basis for the designations were made in a period where AM radio was the primary use case for radio and so frequencies higher than the AM radio band are called "high frequency," whereas today those frequencies are actually much, much lower frequency than nearly all forms of radio communication.

The name MF/HF/VHF etc were defined by ITU v.431 originally in 1953. Amateur radio operators in the 1950s commonly were using “shortwave” frequencies (now referenced as HF commonly). As it’s been told to me from multiple operators in that era, the naming scheme used by ITU for each group is based on the amount of bandwidth available in each group, not based on any presumption of AM radio broadcasts being used as a baseline.

Thanks for explaining that to me, a licensed amateur radio operator for more than 20 years. :p

I meant the AM radio broadcast band as an example of a popular use case of radio in the early days when the "high frequency" designation was made.

They are extremely low frequency compared to where most radio communication occurs today, orders of magnitude higher. Not literally ELF, which isn't used apart from extreme niches.

> a licensed amateur radio operator for more than 20 years

Every HAM I know would ridicule me if I used such wording as you did, which I feel I didn’t do, maybe your experience is different.

My reply was less in explaining it to you though, but more as being informative to others who might’ve not had the experience and thus could learn misleading information from your post.

(I’m also a licensed operator, but not for as long as you)

I don't even know why they do it... I was looking at dishwasher liquid the other day, wondering why it needs all that advertising on it. "New formula!" "Plus Ultra Action!" "Now 20% more effective!" "5% Free"... I'm just buying it for my plates and stuff, gee :D

Reminds me of TVs which I was just shopping for recently. You have your standard old high definition, ultra high definition, high dynamic range, quad high definition, quad resolution, quad full high resolution, etc...

Same issue happened with the naming of silicon development. Thankfully, it seems naming was largely over after "Very Large Scale Integration" (VLSI), having given up on the next generation name: "Ultra large scale integration", but after surpassing "large scale integration".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Scale_Integration

> Super speed

That doesn't take into account that todays super speed will be tomorrows 28.8kbaud modem.

See the naming conventions of monitors/televisions

HD Ready (1280x720)

Full HD (1920x1080)

Quad HD (2560x1440)

4K Ultra HD (3840x2160)

Thank god we hit diminishing returns

Reminds me of how "fast ethernet" (100Mbps) is the slowest type of ethernet still commonly used.

Please tell me your username is a combination between Real Life Quine and also the author of Goosebumps R.L. Stine?

I been wondering about this for the last 11 days...

I think it is less confusing than IEEE designations were to a consumer but it could have been a lot cleaner than what they replaced it with.

Why is this? Is it standards body politics where new standards don’t want to step on the toes of whoever made the previous standard? Like WiFi 7 might imply that WiFi 6 isn’t good enough any more?

The nice thing is where we are well past the point where figuring out if 2 devices are compatible is something most people will bother doing.

Surely the logical successor to 802.11af is 802.11wtaf?

This is an improve meant over 802.11xx however.

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