IEEE 802.11ac
| Gen. | IEEE standard |
Adopt. | Link rate (Mbit/s) |
RF (GHz) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 | 5 | 6 | ||||
| — | 802.11 | 1997 | 1–2 |  |
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| 802.11b | 1999 | 1–11 | |
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| 802.11a | 6–54 | |
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| 802.11g | 2003 | |
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| Wi-Fi 4 | 802.11n | 2009 | 6.5–600 | |
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| Wi-Fi 5 | 802.11ac | 2013 | 6.5–6,933 | |
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| Wi-Fi 6 | 802.11ax | 2021 | 0.4–9,608 | |
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| Wi-Fi 6E | |
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| Wi-Fi 7 | 802.11be | 2024 | 0.4–23,059 | |
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| Wi-Fi 8 | 802.11bn | TBA | |
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IEEE 802.11ac, formally IEEE 802.11ac-2013 and also simply called 802.11ac, is a wireless networking standard in the IEEE 802.11 set of protocols (which is part of the Wi-Fi networking family), providing high-throughput wireless local area networks (WLANs) on the 5 GHz band. The standard has been retroactively labelled as Wi-Fi 5 by Wi-Fi Alliance.
The specification has multi-station throughput of at least 1.1 gigabit per second (1.1 Gbit/s) and single-link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (0.5 Gbit/s). This is accomplished by extending the air-interface concepts embraced by 802.11n: wider RF bandwidth (up to 160 MHz), more MIMO spatial streams (up to eight), downlink multi-user MIMO (up to four clients), and high-density modulation (up to 256-QAM).
The Wi-Fi Alliance separated the introduction of 802.11ac wireless products into two phases ("waves"), named "Wave 1" and "Wave 2". From mid-2013, the alliance started certifying Wave 1 802.11ac products shipped by manufacturers, based on the IEEE 802.11ac Draft 3.0 (the IEEE standard was not finalized until later that year). Subsequently, in 2016, Wi-Fi Alliance introduced the Wave 2 certification, which includes additional features like MU-MIMO (downlink only), 160 MHz channel width support, support for more 5 GHz channels, and four spatial streams (with four antennas; compared to three in Wave 1 and 802.11n, and eight in IEEE's 802.11ax specification). It meant Wave 2 products would have higher bandwidth and capacity than Wave 1 products.