What is IEEE 802.11aq?

IEEE 802.11aq is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, approved in June 2018, that allows discovery of available services in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs).

At the moment, you can not identify the services offered by a wireless network without connecting to it. There is also no way to figure out if your wireless device is compatible with a specific network. The IEEE 802.11aq standard resolves this problem, by specifying the parameters for pre-association queries between wireless networks and devices. Users can swiftly and effortlessly discover what types of services are supported before making the decision to connect by exchanging information between the device and the wireless access point.

This amendment will also help the operators by providing potential revenue generation opportunities, as they can store and cache their available services with access points, allowing them to differentiate their service offerings from their competitors.