How can I see from the command line which IEEE 802.11 wifi protocol (a/b/g/n/ac/...) is used by the active wifi connection?
How can I force the connection to a specific mode?
I am using ubuntu linux (15.10) and an intel 5300 wifi card.
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The 802.11 IEEE is a standard for wireless networking devices which defines a set of specifications for the physical and MAC layers of the OSI model (if you wish to learn more on networking you should definitely get familiar with it).
Most versions normally operate around 2.4GHz/5GHz, and are generally backwards compatible.
The following command is the wireless-only variant of ifconfig:
iwconfig
On Ubuntu and Debian it is part of the wireless-tools package.
ifconfig shows all the available (also virtual) network interfaces conforming to standards 802.x wireless and wired (802.3x is an example of a standard used in wired networking).
iwconfig is exclusively for wireless interfaces such as 802.11x (some pre-802.11 are also supported).
These commands are also used to perform advanced configuration on your interfaces. Refer to their manual for more information.
Edit: since iwconfig is deprecated at the moment (but simple enough to query basic interface features) and no new significant updates are coming, I suggest you take a look at iw (which requires a fairly recent kernel >=3.0. You should have no problems running it on your Ubuntu 15.10 OS).
iw dev
This command returns all the available wireless interfaces. Then, you might want to run iw dev <interface_name> info or iw phy <interface_phy> info.
The first command shows brief information about the interface, while the second shows all the capabilities of the wireless device.
deekin
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