How should wireless technology names be hyphenated and capitalized?

How should wireless technology names be hyphenated and capitalized?

• "a wireless g network"?
• "a wireless-g network"?
• "a wireless-G network"?
• "a wireless G network"?
• none of the above?

Does a formal rule even exist for this?

Solution 1:

There's no "formal rule" for how to refer to any sort of technology other than to defer to however it was named by its creators. The standard you're referring to is officially known as 802.11g and is defined by the IEEE. Doing a search across their site, it appears that they use multiple variations, however:

• The G is almost always capitalized
• The hyphen is normally included
• The W is usually capitalized

So in general, I would recommend

a Wireless-G network.

Edit: Here's a link showing IEEE using the Wireless-G format (see near the bottom of the article for an example that's not in the title)

Solution 2:

What matters is that some of these terms are trademarked, and so, must be written in the way the trademark holders require.

Some examples:

• Wi-Fi^® - owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance
• Bluetooth^® - owned by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group
• WiMAX^™ - owned by the WiMAX Forum
• Wi-Fi Protected Access^® - owned by the Wi-Fi Alliance; also known as WPA
• ZigBee^® - owned by the ZigBee Alliance
• AirPort^® - owned by Apple Inc.
• IPoAC - an IETF^® RFC