IEEE 802.11 uses various frequencies including, but not limited to, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, 6 GHz, and 60 GHz frequency bands. As a result, in the marketplace, each revision tends to become its own standard. While each amendment is officially revoked when it is incorporated in the latest version of the standard, the corporate world tends to market to the revisions because they concisely denote the capabilities of their products. The base version of the standard was released in 1997 and has had subsequent amendments. The standards are created and maintained by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) LAN/ MAN Standards Committee (IEEE 802). IEEE 802.11 is used in most home and office networks to allow laptops, printers, smartphones, and other devices to communicate with each other and access the Internet without connecting wires.

The standard and amendments provide the basis for wireless network products using the Wi-Fi brand and are the world's most widely used wireless computer networking standards.

IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of media access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer communication. For comparison, this Netgear dual-band router from 2013 uses the 'ac' standard, capable of transmitting 1900 Mbit/s (combined).

Ieee 1284 controller