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Comment by justinphelps | Hacker News Reader

"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 WiFi is obsolete tech.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.

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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.

> the vast majority of the spectrum being used by hotspots that are closed to them,

You don't have access to your own wifi ?

Walk around, go anywhere, even in an apartment block and look at the available hotspots. There will be many, and they will nearly all be closed to you.

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