Budget Bill Takes WiFi & Citizen Spectrum Away and Hands It to Wireless Carriers

Posted by WarOnPrivacy 1 day ago

Budget Bill Takes WiFi & Citizen Spectrum Away and Hands It to Wireless Carriers(www.techdirt.com)

36 points | 6 comments

Havoc 19 hours ago|

Really seems like an omnibus of all things terrible type of bill. The fact that they got >50% to vote for what is so obviously rotten is wild

stuaxo 21 hours ago||

What companies were the lobbies who asked for this working for, they should named and the companies vilified.

mike_hearn 20 hours ago|

[flagged]

neilalexander 20 hours ago||

> WiFi is obsolete tech. Even 5Ghz WiFi often barely works, let alone 6GHz (which no Apple device supports)

Sorry, _what_? This is an absurdly ludicrous take. Wi-Fi is one of the most successful and ubiquitous wireless technologies of all time. 5GHz has been working fine for people (especially in locations where 2.4GHz is crowded) for I don't know how many years—at least over a decade, or even two if you count 802.11a. Most Apple devices from the last 2 years support 6GHz too.

justinphelps 20 hours ago|||

"The best thing governments can do to help people in these places is allocate as much spectrum as possible to the carriers. WiFi is obsolete tech. Even 5Ghz WiFi often barely works, let alone 6GHz"

I think that the billions of people that use WiFi every day for free would disagree.

mike_hearn 11 hours ago||

I think that the billions of people who use WiFi every day would agree that it's a pain, the vast majority of the spectrum being used by hotspots that are closed to them, the few that are open all requiring custom login procedures that often may involve wandering around until you find someone who can give you the password, and even then the quality is a tossup and often unusably poor.

WiFi has some value in office buildings for people taking their laptops to meeting rooms, but that works fine with the current spectrum allocations. And it helps in some specific scenarios like airplanes, or hotels if roaming is too expensive. But the remaining use cases are being steadily knocked down by improvements to the mobile protocols, which advance much faster than WiFi does. Given the long term, semi-permanent nature of these decisions it doesn't make sense to allocate more spectrum to a dead-end protocol.

soganess 19 hours ago||

  > no means testing (so not for "poor rural kids")

I pay ~70$ for symmetric gigabit. But, honestly, I would gladly have a kid, move, and then send my kid to underfunded public school in rural Texas... just to be able to con the government out of ~5$ worth of super slow public wifi. Totally worth it!

Means testing is a joke in cases like this. It's just a way for state and local governments to embezzle money from programs meant to help kids.