It's funny that WiFi is alphabet soup as the other comment mentioned, they rebranded to a single, simple number...then chucked an E on the end.

I get how/why, but it's just funny.

6E is great, but basically nothing supports it. I got a 6E capable AP from Ubiquiti, and looking at my devices table, basically nothing has ever used the 6GHz radio. My house has a wide variety of devices, many new. The only thing that's used it is my MacBook

That is a wonderful website, very well written. Thanks for sharing.

Just count them, that's what I do. 1 is a, 2 is b, 3 is g, 4 is n, 5 is ac, 6 is ax.

USB has gotten more complicated and does way more now in more contexts. It charges laptops now, it carries multiplexed displayport signals, it does its own handshake and performs hardware level initialization protocols.

Meanwhile we've been wanting the same thing out of wifi since the start. Nothing's really changed, we just want it to go faster.

The very simple version is that the newer versions support faster speeds.

It's more nuanced than faster speeds. All newer versions of WiFi came with speed improvements but compared with previous versions WiFi 6 speed improvements were comparatively modest. The advantage with WiFi 6 over its predecessors was a focus on improving latency and reliability. The number of supported clients was drastically increased with the implementation of technologies first developed in cell networks. Wireless antennas used to be limited to serving each client one at a time. Now they've been given the ability to multitask.

You can liken it to a restaurant where the cook is the network, the waiter is the wireless antenna, and each customer is a wireless device. With WiFi standards before version 6, the waiter was not very good at their job and once they collected an order, they would give it to the cook and wait for the cook to finish cooking the entire meal before delivering it to the customer and moving on to the next customer. This method was improved in the past by making the waiter quicker which is where we get the speed boosts. You can also improve on this by adding more antennas or "waiters" to the environment but the waiters themselves are still not operating as effectively as they can on an individual level. This is why WiFi 6 is such a major improvement that flies under the radar. The improvement may not be that noticable in a home environment where the antennas only have to serve a limited number of clients but in an environment where hundreds or even thousands of clients are communicating simultaneously, this is a critical improvement. On top of this, the improvements have decreased the rate of packets being dropped and improved latency so even in home environments, a network running on WiFi 6 will be more robust and reliable. WiFi 7 will go back to the old paradigm of significantly increasing speed once again.

Lots of really cool little things that add up to making it faster

https://youtu.be/j5egLKTwOt0

It's a retroactive name just to keep the numbering scheme logical. It would be weird to start off giving the next version "1" so they added numbers to all of the old versions. 802.11n was renamed a full 15 years after it was released!

802.11a was 5GHz long before Wi-Fi 5 was a phrase, and "Wi-Fi 5" as a phrase does not imply any particular frequency.

It was like a posthumous award

Yes, as a general rule the device and access point will just connect at whatever the newest version they both understand is.