Is November 11th the birthday of Wi-Fi?

It’s a good candidate! But it’s only the birthday of the top half of Wi-Fi — the MAC. The design of Wi-Fi consists of a single “Medium Access” protocol that operates today in conjunction with multiple “Physical Layer” radio systems. On November 11, 1993, the IEEE standards committee for wireless LANs selected the “Distributed Foundation Wireless MAC” protocol developed by Symbol, NCR, and Xircom as the foundation for the standard. This MAC foundation was paired with the “802.11b” Physical Layer and was launched as Wi-Fi on September 15, 1999 — which thus is Wi-Fi’s real birthday. Additional Physical Layer implementations were subsequently combined with this foundation MAC protocol to create the various flavors of Wi-Fi today, such as Wi-Fi 4, 5, and 6.

Read further about the birth of Wi-Fi in Beyond Everywhere.