  In September 2020, the Broadband Forum published a new industry standard for
measuring network quality. The standard centers on the notion of quality
attenuation. Quality attenuation is a measure of the distribution of latency
and packet loss between two points connected by a network path. A vital feature
of the quality attenuation idea is that we can express detailed application
requirements and network performance measurements in the same mathematical
framework. Performance requirements and measurements are both modeled as
latency distributions. To the best of our knowledge, existing models of the
802.11 WiFi protocol do not permit the calculation of complete latency
distributions without assuming steady-state operation. We present a novel model
of the WiFi protocol. Instead of computing throughput numbers from a
steady-state analysis of a Markov chain, we explicitly model latency and packet
loss. Explicitly modeling latency and loss allows for both transient and
steady-state analysis of latency distributions, and we can derive throughput
numbers from the latency results. Our model is, therefore, more general than
the standard Markov chain methods. We reproduce several known results with this
method. Using transient analysis, we derive bounds on WiFi throughput under the
requirement that latency and packet loss must be bounded.
