The Wi-Fi Alliance is an industry group aimed at increasing the ease of deploying 802.11 products. Wi-Fi is the brand name for technologies based on 802.11. The Wi-Fi alliance adopts portions of the 802.11 standard and creates a set of certifications around them. This is important because the 802.11 technology alone does not guarantee that products in the market will be able to communicate with each other or interoperate. The Wi-Fi alliance makes sure that devices claiming to be ‘WiFi’ are interoperable with other Wi-Fi devices on the market. Another way to distinguish between IEEE 802.11 and Wi-Fi is to think of 802.11 as an academic standard, whereas Wi-Fi is the actual implementation of it which is an industry standard.