IEEE 802.11 family
IEEE 802.11a
IEEE 802.11b
IEEE 802.11g
IEEE 802.11
The name IEEE 802.11 in which "8 represents peace, the 0 represents love and the 2 represents harmony. The two 1s stand for gullible? Where does this piece of information come from? It is interesting to know though. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) put together a standard for wireless Ethernet back in 1997 sanctimoniously titled: 802.11.
Version
802.11 then branched out into a "b" version which pumped up the transmission speed from a couple of megabits per second (Mbps) in the original version to up to 11 Mbps along with a few more tweaks. But this was not to last much longer as two more standards were introduced and are now being developed and deployed, 802.11a and 802.11g (this is worse than the TI calculator nomenclature). 802.11a operates at the 5-6 GHZ radio wave spectrum whereas the other 3 all work in the 2.4 GHZ wavelength (many cordless phones operate in this spectrum which can cause "fuzzy" interference, also known as static or loss of connection).
Properties
Both 802.11a and 802.11g are capable of even faster speeds, both maxing out at around 54 Mbps. A couple of notes however, 802.11g is entirely backwards compatible with 802.11b and 802.11 whereas 802.11a is self-centered and is only compatible with 802.11 (and you thought RSS was annoying). And the maximum range for all of these versions is about 150 Texas feet which is equivalent to 45-50 meters.