Senate GOP budget bill has little-noticed provision that could hurt your Wi-Fi
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Part of the problem in the case of this bill is the Senate's filibuster. There's one bill a year, the funding bill, that requires a simple majority to pass, and can't be filibustered. In the case of nearly evenly split Senate, this might be the only controversial bill to pass.
There's also an issue of majority party unity and competence that contributes to garbage pail bills.
EDIT: looks like it's not ISM, maybe they'd continue allowing Very Low Power devices on 6GHz while auctioning out higher power licenses?
>Calabrese said he expects the biggest impact of reducing Wi-Fi's use of 6 GHz at "busy venues such as schools, airports, sporting arenas, shopping malls, all the different places where many people gather together and try to get on the same access points and unlicensed spectrum through Wi-Fi."
but I don't think I can remember the last time I connected to wifi at some sort of public venue. In most cases I'm there to do something, and don't mind burning a bit of my data allotment to avoid going through the hassle of connecting to wifi. Even at places like airports I don't think bandwidth was ever an issue. I'm typically not doing bandwidth intensive tasks like downloading Steam games.
The only other use case I can think of is wifi in apartment buildings, but most uses of home internet don't really require fast speeds. 4K streaming only takes around 25-30 Mb/s. Bandwidth heavy stuff like game updates can be done using wired, and in my experience 5 ghz's penetrating power isn't good enough that the airwaves end up getting congested.
But the real utility is that more spectrum means less congestion. At a school or stadium it's not about trying to get 4x4x2 multi-band MIMO and 1024qam pumping 2GBps to a device. It's about having sufficient spectrum so that lots and lots of devices can operate at once without frequent collisions.
For many people in cities, wifi 6E has been a godsend, has made wifi usable. It's unbelievably forsaken to imagine giving up a sizable chunk of this spectrum to a bunch of cellular carriers (or other good parts of the spectrum!). As usual, this feels like another vile act do the worst possible things to the public. The one time (!!!! Auctions are insane rent seeking!!) pocket change the FCC collects for this spectrum is irrelevant, this is another act of pure malice. Sell off the land, sell off the airwaves. Hive of villainy.
It's the same thing with the existing DFS bands - I've never found any equipment in my area that will utilize it and stay on it. So when I switch my access point to it, it's great. Until it auto switches back to avoid interference. If there was actually equipment that was able to stay on it I think it'd be equally useless.