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60 free Wi-Fi trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Wi-Fi trivia quiz covers the wireless networking standard that quietly took over the world, from a Dutch cash-register project in 1991 to Wi-Fi 7. The easy questions are the ones any laptop owner knows: what the two main radio bands are, which kitchen appliance interferes with your signal, what SSID stands for, why the name is written with a hyphen, and which company first put it in a consumer laptop. From there it moves into the alphabet soup of 802.11 letters, the Wi-Fi Alliance and its yin-yang logo, and how the technology got its name from a branding agency. The hard end covers the disputed history: NCR and AT&T's WaveLAN, Vic Hayes and the IEEE committee, the CSIRO team led by John O'Sullivan and the hundreds of millions of dollars Australia collected in patent settlements, plus the security story from WEP to KRACK to WPA3, the WPS PIN flaw, wardriving, eduroam and Wi-Fi positioning. Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent gets a question too, with the caveat the record deserves. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11, the Wi-Fi Alliance and related topics, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
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Q 01Wi-Fi is a family of wireless protocols based on which family of IEEE standards?
802.11
802.3 is Ethernet, 802.15 covers personal area networks and 1394 is FireWire.
Q 02The two radio bands Wi-Fi most commonly uses are 5 GHz and which other?
2.4 GHz
Newer generations add a third, higher band; each band is split into multiple channels.
Q 03Which common kitchen appliance shares Wi-Fi's most crowded radio band and can interfere with it?
Microwave oven
A 1985 FCC ruling opened parts of the ISM bands for unlicensed use, which is why Wi-Fi shares spectrum with microwaves and cordless phones.
Q 04Which brand-consulting firm coined the name Wi-Fi in 1999?
Interbrand
The Wi-Fi Alliance wanted something catchier than "IEEE 802.11b Direct Sequence"; the name was picked from a list of ten.
Q 05The name Wi-Fi was partly chosen because it echoes which older consumer term?
Hi-Fi
Whether it is really short for "Wireless Fidelity" is disputed, though the Alliance briefly used that slogan.
Q 06What shape is the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification logo?
A yin-yang
The agency that named it designed the logo too; the spellings WiFi and wifi are not approved by the Alliance.
Q 07The organisation that owns the Wi-Fi trademark was founded in 1999 under what name?
Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance
WECA's founders included 3Com, Aironet, Harris, Lucent, Nokia and Symbol; it renamed itself the Wi-Fi Alliance in 2002.
Q 08In 1991, NCR Corporation and AT&T invented the precursor to 802.11 in Nieuwegein in which country?
Netherlands
The product was intended for cashier systems.
Q 09What was the name of the NCR/AT&T wireless product that preceded 802.11?
WaveLAN
One of NCR's engineers went on to chair the IEEE 802.11 committee for ten years.
Q 10Which NCR engineer chaired the IEEE 802.11 committee for ten years and is often called the father of Wi-Fi?
Vic Hayes
He and Bell Labs engineer Bruce Tuch approached the IEEE to create the standard.
Q 11Which Australian research agency built a WLAN prototype in 1992 and lodged a Wi-Fi patent that later earned it hundreds of millions of dollars?
CSIRO
Three countries claim to have invented Wi-Fi, and no global consensus exists.
Q 12John O'Sullivan's Australian team adapted a technique for reducing multipath interference that he had originally developed for what field?
Radio astronomy
His earlier paper on sharpening radio-telescope images fed directly into the 1996 patent.
Q 13How much was the Australian agency awarded in its 2009 Wi-Fi patent settlement with 14 technology companies?
$200 million
Q 21The 802.11ad amendment for the 60 GHz millimetre-wave band is sold under what brand?
WiGig
Its peak rate is 7 Gbit/s, but 60 GHz signals barely pass through walls.
Q 22By 2025, the fastest Wi-Fi versions at close range could reach roughly what speed?
23 Gbit/s
That is more than ten thousand times the speed of the original 1997 standard.
Q 23What does SSID stand for?
Service Set Identifier
It is the network name users see; a hidden network simply stops broadcasting it.
What is the maximum length of an SSID?
A further $220 million followed in 2012 after proceedings against 23 more companies.
Q 14The first version of the 802.11 protocol, released in 1997, offered link speeds of up to how much?
2 Mbit/s
802.11b raised it to 11 Mbit/s in 1999.
Q 15Ad hoc Wi-Fi networking, with no access point, proved especially popular for multiplayer games on which kind of device?
Handheld game consoles
The Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable both used it; digital cameras adopted it too.
Q 16Apple's 1999 iBook was the first mass consumer product with Wi-Fi. What did Apple call the feature?
AirPort
It was developed with the same Lucent group that helped create the standard.
Q 17When the Wi-Fi Alliance introduced simplified generation numbers, which 802.11 standard became "Wi-Fi 4"?
802.11n
802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5 and 802.11ax Wi-Fi 6.
Q 18Which antenna technology did 802.11n introduce, letting devices use several antennas at once?
MIMO
Multiple-input multiple-output raised net data rates to as much as 600 Mbit/s.
Q 19Wi-Fi 6E extends Wi-Fi 6 into which additional frequency band?
6 GHz
Wi-Fi 6 itself, based on 802.11ax, works in the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands and adds a cellular-style feature called OFDMA.
Q 20Wi-Fi 7 is based on which IEEE amendment, dubbed Extremely High Throughput?
802.11be
Development began with a draft in March 2021 and the final document was published in July 2025.
32 bytes
Each basic service set is separately identified by a 48-bit BSSID, essentially a MAC address.
Q 25How many bits long is the MAC address that identifies every Wi-Fi station?
48
The address specifies both source and destination of each data packet.
Q 26The scheme by which Wi-Fi stations share a channel by transmitting only when it is sensed idle is called what?
CSMA/CA
Carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance cannot fully prevent collisions, which is why throughput drops on busy channels.
Q 27How many channels in Wi-Fi's lower band are permitted in the United States, compared with 13 in Europe and 14 in Japan?
11
Channels are numbered at 5 MHz spacing but transmitters occupy at least 20 MHz, so they overlap.
Q 28The typical indoor range of a Wi-Fi access point is about how far?
20 metres
Some access points claim up to 150 metres outdoors; walls and pillars cut range sharply.
Q 29In the European Union, Wi-Fi transmitter power (EIRP) is limited to how much?
100 mW
That is 20 dBm; by comparison personal-area radios have far shorter range and lower power consumption.
Q 30Wi-Fi's original encryption scheme, now easily cracked with tools like Aircrack-ng, was called what?
WEP
Wired Equivalent Privacy was ratified with the 1997 standard and later formally deprecated.