Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi
Cruz bill could take 6 GHz spectrum away from Wi-Fi, give it to mobile carriers.
How would that work for the people already using 6 GHz routers?
Presumably given they’ve all been released in the past few years and are still getting updates the manufacturers would release an update disabling the functionality to comply with law. Same with end user devices removing the functionality via software update.
You’d have a small percentage of holdouts who have auto updates off and also refuse to apply it manually and who also have non-updated computers or smartphone. They’d leave it up to whoever buys the spectrum to locate illegal use like this based on detected interference in their usage, report it to the FCC and they send you a nasty letter followed by debilitating fines and a legal order to seize your equipment if that fails.
In practice people who go out of their way to avoid the updates that disable it will probably see no consequences but decreasing benefits as well and will eventually update or replace devices.
I’m just glad we live in a country where politicians can also be experts in RF design/engineering and make policies based on their expertise.
Next they are gonna take away amateur radio frequencies so it would be illegal to communicate outside of the internet.
Then its very easy to do censorship, just turn off power to ISPs and its information blackout.
I mean, does anyone actually communicate on the ham bands? HF is for contesting and contesting only, 2 meters is for "checking in and out" on ragchew nets, 70cm is 2m again except half the range, 220 is hipster 2 meter, and I've never been given a reason to even think about 33cm and above. You're more likely to find discussion about Icom vs Yaesu's incompatible 2 meter digital things than high UHF.
Most actual communication is illegal on the ham bands one way or another so...I haven't renewed my license.
Most actual communication is illegal on the ham bands one way or another
Except in case of emergency, natural disaster, etc. Before we carried cell phones, I had ham handhelds that we would talk directly to each other on 70cm for the usual "Hi honey, I'm on my way home" or... in the days before cell phone lots existed at airports, I'd call her on the handheld to let her know I was approaching the passenger drop-off/pickup area at the airport after a flight so she could start going there from whatever makeshift staging area she was in.
Anyway, when we would be out in the woods, we could reach each other roughly 1/2 mile like that from handheld to handheld, but if we ever had a serious problem we could switch to 2m and hit the local repeater which would get us more like 12 miles of range and coverage all the way into town where there was usually somebody who could make a 911 call if we needed it.
So, yeah, we have cell phones today, and they work when they work, but I find that when the cell phones don't work (like during / after a hurricane) the ham bands generally are working - or at least are restored quicker, and nobody is going to press charges for emergency communications on the ham bands.
If you want to use the ham band for instacart dispatch coordination, yeah, you're gonna get more than static about that.
I live in Appalachia and people here regularly use ham for weather reports but that's about it. If there was an actual emergency I assume that would be sent out as well.
Its always Cruz.
Rat Bastard Rafael Cruz
Well whoever ends up buying that band is in for a load of shit because I and a lot of other people are NOT going to stop using 6GHz WiFi
Same thing with Meshtastic. Go ahead and see just how much you'll waste your money.
Yup, the band is already littered with 6g devices. It'd be a stupid purchase.
But also, 6GHz is somewhat of a useless band for carriers. It's high enough frequency that it'll get absorbed by most things yet low enough frequency that it'll struggle to really carry a whole lot of data.
What do you mean by same thing with Meshtastic, are they trying to sell spectrum around 900mHz too?
IDK I heard something about it. I think it may have been the 866 MHz one?
Yep, just set your Wi-Fi routers to use 6GHD and trample all over the other people in the band until they figure out that they can't control it.
It's a bad band for cellular. It's short-range and shit at penetration.
It's really not even that good for wifi unless you're close or have a mesh network with APs all over the building.
Because of its shortcomings as a communication bandwidth, it's really, really good at cell-based positioning.
mesh network
Or traditional network with Ethernet backhaul and lots of access points. I really wish mesh networks would die off honestly.
The cell carriers don't need more bandwith. 5G is already quite fast with the existing allocations. The only times I've used 5G and thought it's too slow has been in rural areas where the issue is a lack of nearby cell towers, not a lack of bandwidth. The cell carriers already have loads of millimeter wave bandwidth available for use in densely packed, urban areas where the lower frequency bands are insufficient.
It's WiFi that should be getting more bandwidth. Home internet connections keep getting faster. Multi gigabit speeds are now common in areas with fiber.
and on top of that, 5G afaik is specifically made so that if you need more density, you can turn down the cell power and install more cell sites rather than take more spectrum
it was designed for venues like sports stadiums so you could keep installing more and more cell towers inside stadiums etc to accommodate huge crowds
This exactly. Wifi is damn near unusable in dense residential settings. It'll cut it for streaming and web browsing, but much more than that and you'll feel the pain of interference from all the other wifi APs in the area.
Especially with most of them defaulting to 80MHz on 5GHz and many of those defaulting away from UNII-2. which leaves 4 non-overlapping channels (with one of them giving trouble with a lot of devices). We're right back to where we were in 2.4. Even worse, I think, since wifi is more ubiquitous.
So if I'm reading this right... wired Internet providers are against this due to home Wi-Fi Internet speeds and phone providers are for this for mobile speeds/bandwidth?
I don't know how I feel about this as I currently have T-Mobile home Internet and it's not the best experience... but it mostly works and it's cheaper than my previous cable provider. However, home Wi-Fi really needs 6 GHz for future IoT devices.
But I am definitely against it because Ted Cruz is for it. He obviously is getting paid/bribed by the telecoms... and he sucks.
Eh, IoT devices typically use 2.4ghz, or even 933mhz...
I kinda meant for like future products when AR and VR combine with IoT products, but if those can work on lower ranges with those 6 Ghz devices, then great... but VR and AR will definitely need 6 GHz to be more useful.
I thought wifi was on 2.4ghz, and the new ones were on 5ghz?
Current generation wifi 6E and 7 add 6Ghz which offers substantially more bandwidth / speed.
Wifi 7 also allows devices to use 2.4/5/6Ghz at the same time instead of just hard switching between them.
Would be a major setback since 6Ghz allows devices to easily hit Gigabit speeds wirelessly.
Yeah, I've got Wifi 7 set up and it's awesome. I've got a single access point, and I get full gigabit in my office with line of sight, and it auto switches to 5GHz or 2.4GHz when I move too far away. It's also great for apartments since it's more easily blocked by walls, there's way less interference from neighbors.
802.11a is over 20 years old, fortunately this law isn't talking about shutting down existing routers. the 6 GHZ is the next frontier to expand to, the military already owns the 7 GHZ spectrum... So the 6 GHZ is the one that can be expanded into. Of which origionally was planned to be made for the next generation of wifi... but now is going to be sold off to phone providers to use in the next generation of mobile networks.
So in short, our existing routers will continue to work as designed, but future routers will not be making any leaps forward.
Basically the choice between better faster wireless LANs, is getting killed in favor of better networks for cellphone services... of which the carriers will set the price on.
802.11a was 5ghz, 802.11b was 2.4ghz. Both developed at the same time.
802.11g was 2.4ghz and extended b since 2.4 took off faster than 5ghz in the market.
Since g, n onwards has been used across both bands.
Since 802.11ax we now have 6ghz.
WiFi is on all three bands. It's not so much what's newer vs older. Newer devices tend to support 2.4, 5, and 6 and switch between them based on quality of signal and support by the WiFi network. Higher frequencies like 5 and 6GHz are generally better because there's less interference.
Cheaper devices tend to only support 2.4GHz
Nah wifi was actually originally on 5GHz spectrum, with 802.11a. It came out shortly before 802.11b, which used 2.4GHz, and was objectively better...but component shortages for 802.11a devices made the inferior 802.11b more successful on the market.
Then in 2009, after 802.11b and 802.11g came 802.11n, which used the 5GHz spectrum, and introduced dual-band routers to consumers.
Most recently, 6GHz got allocated with the advent of Wifi 6E and Wifi 7.
