Wi-Fi is one of the great backward compatibility success stories

is a weekend editor who covers the latest in tech and entertainment. He has written news, reviews, and more as a tech journalist since 2020. My home network is a small miracle of backward compatibility, slinging data across 60-plus devices that span five generations of Wi-Fi. Everything on it, from my iPhone 15 Pro all the way down to my Nintendo Wii, manages to connect to the internet, most of it wirelessly through my router, with shockingly few issues. That’s possible because of Wi-Fi’s essentially unbroken line of interoperability that stretches from its 1999 introduction in consumer products through today. Wi-Fi devices do this by being shapeshifters. When two of them connect, the one using the newest generation of the standard will automatically switch to the highest Wi-Fi version the other one is equipped for. Making sure that works means lots of testing for compatibility, maintaining old parts of the standard, and coming up with new ways to make existing tech more viable. That ... Read full article.