I thought 802.11a is a very old standard, before even b, that came out in 1999. However, I’m seeing some new devices that are just coming out that claim to support 802.11a. Do they mean ac, which is supposed to be the successor to n? Is it me, or are 802.11 standards a mess ever since draft-n? Are n products fully compatible?
Google has listed the Nexus 5 as having “802.11nc” (if you search for just 802.11nc, there are a bunch of articles on this). Either they have invented a whole new protocol with the Nexus, or even the great Google has no clue about wireless standards. It’s shameful that they’ve listed this in not one, but multiple promotional materials.
Probably they mean ac. But who knows? Maybe they jumped past 400 versions straight to nc?
But seriously, everything from .11o to .11ab were skipped over, so it probably is 802.11ac compatibility. Of course, 802.11ad is probably out next year.
WAG: Google or LG wants to indicate compatibility with both n and ac and the marketing guys screwed up.
802.11 is just a massive headache at this point. IEEE needs a working group just for versioning 802.11.
I work in IT and I haven’t seen that terminology on anything recent myself. I don’t doubt you however. It is probably just an editing mistake. 802.11a is a very old standard that nobody would care about anymore. 802.11b was the earliest common standard that anyone would care about for backwards compatibility. 802.11ac is the newest standard that you can buy for consumer level products even though it still hasn’t been completely standardized yet. That has to be what they are referring to although you can tell easily just by looking at the stated speed of the connection.
802.11a in actual usage was mostly after 802.11b, rather than before. The data rate was 54mbit/sec - the same as 802.11g but on the 5ghz band instead of 2.4ghz. I would think that new equipment would be 802.11ac, which is normally going to be backwards compatible with 802.11a as they both use 5ghz. I think all or just about all of the Access points you can buy today that are 802.11ac also support the 2.4ghz band for 802.11n/b/g as well, although 802.11ac itself is only on the 5ghz bands.
If it’s really supported, I guess implementing it must cost so little (probably no extra hardware) that they just went ahead, even though it may not have been used in the last 10 years. I vaguely remember a competing with b by having higher speed, but less range.