802.11g – the people’s Wi-Fi

IEEE Std 802.11g-2003, aka Amendment 4, showed up right when Wi-Fi needed it most. launched in 2003, no official "Task Group G" label floating around, just more solid work from the 802.11 crew. and unlike some earlier amendments, this one caught fire in the real world.

11g’s job? bring faster speeds to the good old 2.4 GHz band. it followed in the footsteps of 11a, which had all the speed but none of the compatibility – 5 GHz just wasn’t everywhere yet. so 11g brought the same idea – OFDM – into the 2.4 GHz zone where most devices already lived.

tech-wise, it was built on something called ERP – Extended Rate PHY. sounds fancy, but it just means they added OFDM on top of the older DSSS system to get those higher speeds. the real trick was backward compatibility: 11g could talk to 11b devices, which meant no one had to throw out their old gear. OFDM magic in Clause 19, for those who like to dig.

with 11g, you got up to 54 Mbps in the same band your cordless phone used. that made it practical, cheap, and fast enough for streaming, file sharing, and home networks. it was everywhere – cafés, homes, schools – if it had Wi-Fi, it was probably running 11g for a good while.

and yeah, it too got folded into the big 802.11-2007 revision, and carried forward into 2012, 2016, and 2020. still lurking in chipsets today as a fallback option, believe it or not.

802.11g wasn’t revolutionary – it was smart. fast enough, compatible with the past, and exactly what Wi-Fi needed to go mainstream.