7 ms·

Brazen Attempts by Hotels to Block Wi-Fi

88 points by mahyarm 12y ago

calgoo 12y ago
So if they are interrupting my communications, i should be allowed to do the same back, right? Example: Im in a hotel on business and use my mifi-type device for my colleges as my company requests me to do to lower costs. Now, if they block that signal they are interfering with my business needs. So in my book, i should be allowed to block their traffic that is interfering with mine. Or would that be illegal as its on their premises and all that BS...
- Klinky 12y ago
  Not really. You're renting a space from them, and they can dictate what you're allowed to do in that space. I would say the hotel has the right to ask guests to not use these devices in their rooms, but they should not be actively jamming public frequencies or sending malicious packets to these devices.
memracom 12y ago
Just travel to Canada instead and stay at one of the many hotels that offer free WiFi to all hotel guests. This is the way of the future. Especially for those families with multiple devices. Mom and Dad's laptops, tablets and phone, plus the kids tablets...
_delirium 12y ago
Another discussion of this topic, though on a different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794476
mikestew 12y ago
"Marriott and the hotel association say that if the commission rules against them, some hotels might prohibit guests from checking in with Wi-Fi devices or restrict such equipment from some parts of their properties, a move that would only alienate their customers." IOW, it has nothing to do with "protecting customers from roque networks" as mentioned elsewhere in the article. No, they simply don't want you using equipment that bypasses their usury for WiFi use.
- notthemessiah 12y ago
  "In October, the F.C.C. fined Marriott $600,000 for preventing customers from using their own Wi-Fi devices at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville. The commission said the hotel was charging people attending and exhibiting at a conference $250 to $1,000 per device to connect to the hotel-operated Wi-Fi service. Previously, the F.C.C. prohibited Boston’s Logan International Airport from blocking Wi-Fi networks set up by airline clubs." It's pretty heavily implied by the article that this it intended to prevent circumvention of exorbitant rates.
  - eli 12y ago
    And also that it's intended for conference exhibitors, where exorbitant rates for every little additional thing in a booth is part of the deal. A $100 wastepaper basket, for example. Now, if it were up to me they would just price the booths at a fair price per square foot rather than try to make a profit on "extras."
    - vinceguidry 12y ago
      You tend to find this kind of pricing structure in industries where consumers don't want to pay fair up-front prices. Transportation, Keurigs, video games, phone apps, to some extent wireless cell service. You're forced to provide basic access to your service at rates that don't allow you to make a real profit. So you try to make it up in extras. Customers mumble and grouse, try to get by on the minimum level of service, but it's really their fault. You don't have to pay the exorbitant extras, when I fly, I find the lowest fare I can find and limit myself to a small bag with the bare essentials. I do my homework. I don't mind it at all because I'm getting a service I want at a lower price, that I might not have been able to afford otherwise. Capitalism is wonderful.
- obstinate 12y ago
  I would love to see them try to turn down people who have devices capable of being a WiFi hotspot. That would be, at least, all AT&T customers not on the unlimited plan? Hotels, don't be silly. You would never do that.
Peaker 12y ago
Sounds like material good enough to start a boycott movement?
- danuker 12y ago
  Indeed. I don't see why laws should be passed when we could simply boycott them.
  - michaelhoffman 12y ago
    Laws against willfully or maliciously interfering with authorized wireless communication already exist. Marriott wants a new law passed with a loophole for their specific brand of willful or malicious interference.
- eli 12y ago
  Worth noting that they're talking about wifi for exhibitors in the convention hall, not in the rooms.
- kordless 12y ago
  How about we all use Airbnb instead?
- baddox 12y ago
  Those work better when the industry you're boycotting hasn't succeeded in regulatory capture.
- EC1 12y ago
  When have boycotts ever worked?
doxcf434 12y ago
Hotel wifi is often flakey and slow, so blocking a potentially better connection is all the more insidious of them.
mgkimsal 12y ago
I was investigating conference locations a few years back, and many people had suggested a local big chain hotel. It was a techish conference, so I inquired about the wifi capabilities. Their 'list rate' (which I was told I could try to negotiate with the regional office) was $25 per person per day. This was outside of whatever charge for "wifi in my hotel room" my guests would pay too. I said "so.. for 150 people, for 2 days, you want me charge me $7500 just for wifi access whether people use it or not?" "Yes sir, that's correct". Yeah, I know, I know, bundle it in to the ticket price, etc, but.... just... there's a line you gotta draw somewhere, and that was it for me. They were off the list at that point.
tw04 12y ago
I find it humorous their solution is to block other people's wifi. How about you just provide wifi that doesn't suck? Stayed at a Hilton in Memphis that I think had 10gbit uplink. It was fast enough that I wouldn't have even considered tethering instead. In most hotels, you're lucky to see 1mbit worth of speed at less than 500ms latency. With a connection like that, it's literally highway robbery if they're allowed to block access points. If I'm traveling for work and need to download an ISO overnight, and I'm unable to because they're blocking it, it should be criminal.
- aggie 12y ago
  Forgive my lack of a source, but I read a while back that hotel wifi is often so bad because they signed short-sighted contracts in the past that locked them in to these terrible data rates for many years. And now they pass that terrible deal on to their guests. Edit: well I found the 'source' - turns out it was a Hacker News comment, so take it for what it's worth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8082519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8082519
  - seanp2k2 12y ago
    I find it hard to believe that lobbying the FCC is cheaper than paying lawyers to engineer their way out of those contracts. With the crazy fees mentioned in the article for wifi access (seriously, $1000 per device?), it's not hard to see that their "protecting users" line of arguing is BS when there is such a clear profit motive. Also, I totally don't get their strategy here, since it's not like there aren't other hotels which are nicer / cheaper / better-suited to conventions than Marriott. Really hope that they lose a lot of business for trying to pull such a stupid, petty trick to increase profits. In combination with their push to "remind you to tip their maids" so they can pay them less, I'm really excited to watch them burn.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    This was brought up in a recent HN thread (that you just found). The way it feels to me, forgive the profanity - it's assholes that got screwed by other assholes. Signing up for such "short-sighted contracts" is stupid, but offering those in the field of fast-changing technology (and not upgrading them when the technology changes to the point of the contract being ridiculous) feels... evil.
blazespin 12y ago
Hotels should be able to charge whatever they want. If you don't want to pay for wifi, chose another hotel for your conference.
- infinotize 12y ago
  Read the article again. The issue isn't really about the price for wifi, it's that hotels are blocking the spectrum so you can't set up your own wifi or tether (which is not allowed by the FCC).
- bbcbasic 12y ago
  Then by the same token they should block cellphones and charge $10 a minute for calls. Also how about bringing the water you purchased outside back to the room? Should be confiscated.
  - baddox 12y ago
    If there weren't protectionist regulations that create massive barriers to entry in the hotel industry, neither of those things would be an issue, because any hotel that implemented them would get eaten alive by competitors.
    - vidarh 12y ago
      Are you implying the hotel market isn't competitive? I don't know about the US, but I remember a European hotel investor claim that he usually only invested in hotels after they'd been through 3-4 bankruptcies, because it was first then that the price and debt load had dropped enough for the hotel to have a decent shot at becoming profitable.
      - baddox 12y ago
        I'm implying that the more competitive the hotel market is, the less of a problem customers will have with blatantly ridiculous policies like those mentioned.
    - 12y ago
spankalee 12y ago
How exactly do they block WiFi while simultaneously providing WiFi?
- jrockway 12y ago
  By telling their access points to send deauth requests to all devices that aren't on their networks. And yup, 802.11 tells devices to deauth even when receiving unencrypted deauth requests from access points the device expects to be encrypted.
  - ryan-c 12y ago
    Deauth packets are normally sent in the clear even for encrypted networks, though 802.11w is supposed to fix that eventually.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Sounds like someone is/will get a nice business out of selling tiny little "wifi killer" devices that just continuously sends deauth's to everyone, that can be plugged into some well hidden outlets somewhere when you're not happy with them...
    - AakashPatel 12y ago
      Thankfully some enterprise equipment (I can only speak of Meraki access points) can detect such attacks. So, you could localize (to a degree) where such an attack was coming from based on the AP locations.
  - AakashPatel 12y ago
    I do IT for a few hotels and I've never found this feature useful. While I agree it's useful to be able to control RF noise (by annoying someone enough with the deauth packets that they turn off their tethering), it's difficult to differentiate between nearby businesses and homes vs. someone tethering on-site.
    - 12y ago
zw123456 12y ago
Aside from the obviously stupid on the part of the hotels, can't someone just use USB tethering instead of WiFi to connect to their cellular device?
- clarkm 12y ago
  Yep. On top of that, I'm pretty sure iPhones use bluetooth tethering by default anyways.
- AakashPatel 12y ago
  Yep, that'd be an alternative.
ryan-c 12y ago
"But the best way for hotels to deal with rogue networks is to inform law enforcement agencies and help them apprehend criminals who are trying to steal information." That's an absurd point to make. One does not even need to run a rouge access point - much traffic is in the clear, and many MitM attacks can be pulled off just using injection. Even if someone were running a rouge access point, it's pretty difficult to track down an exact location (not very hard to figure out what room it's in though) in a crowd without direction finding gear and special equipment. They would get much more sympathy as far as security goes if they were only asking for the right to block rouge access points that have the same ESSID as their official ones.
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  Okay, given that the security angle is a subterfuge, but let's say you run a hotel with a network named "RyansExorbitantWifi" and I set up a WAP named "RyanWifi-Free". I think we both know it's gonna generate some interest. Then I can serve them fake versions of Facebook, Google, and their bank's login pages, which is a lot wider of an attack vector than trying to sidejack via packet sniffing.
  - ryan-c 12y ago
    Enumerating some possibilities, here are things the hotel can do: * Deauth jam nothing * Deauth jam "evil twin" access points only * Deauth jam above plus access points "similar" to the official wifi (have fun trying to prevent homoglyph attacks) * Deauth jam all unofficial unencrypted access points (preventing an attack from monitoring probe requests and spinning up matching fake APs on the fly) perhaps with a whitelist of "known" nearby wireless networks to leave alone * Deauth jam all unofficial WiFi (what they want to do) There's not really much difference from a security standpoint between those last two, though I suppose someone could set up an encrypted rouge network like "FreeWifi - password is swordfish" and/or make flyers for their evil network. Basically, I could empathize with them arguing to jam any open wireless networks, but jamming encrypted wireless networks in the name of security is a major stretch.
skuhn 12y ago
There is a technical basis for concern, although ultimately the problem is of the hotel's own making. You simply cannot have 500 mifi-type devices transmitting data (along with the hotel's actual WAPs) in the same room without major problems. There are only three non-overlapping channels for 2.4Ghz 802.11b/g/n, and mifi devices that I'm familiar with pick a "good" channel on startup -- they don't limit themselves just to the three non-overlapping ones. 5GHz is better, and the decreased ability to pass through walls is likely desirable here. However, your mifi is still broadcasting in 2.4GHz, and wifi clients will fall back to that if they don't like the quality of the 5GHz signal. OS X, for instance, is very finicky about using 5GHz on an SSID that broadcasts for both 2.4/5. Right now I'm approximately 6 feet away from my AP, and my laptop has switched to 2.4GHz. Ultimately though, this whole mess is the fault of the hotel's poor implementation. If their wifi was free or low cost, and worked well, then why wouldn't everyone use it? That people are using their mifi devices says they are being ill served by the existing solution, not that they were just dying to pay AT&T more money and carry around yet another black plastic brick. By providing crappy service, these hotels have created the problem they're complaining about. Either don't do it at all (and save money / hassle to boot), or do it right.
- calgoo 12y ago
  I would just push for the FCC to release more bandwidth then, so there is no overlapping. Lobby for that instead of making a loophole that will be abused in every possible way.
  - skuhn 12y ago
    Agreed, but I don't know if anything can really be done for 2.4GHz at this point.
    - jrockway 12y ago
      Wifi's modulation schemes aren't the best for the real-world 2.4GHz spectrum. They work really well in the lab, and mildly well in the real world. Getting rid of Wifi and replacing it with something else could make unlicensed wireless networking more reliable. LTE-U seems like the way forward here, though it seems there are some industry barriers in the way. (If you make LTE chips and sell them all to cell phone carriers, and they tell you they don't like LTE-U, you probably won't be in a hurry to start selling LTE-U chipsets. Pure speculation.) That said, 5GHz Wifi does pretty well. There is a misconception that 5GHz doesn't go through walls, but that really has no scientific basis (2.4GHz and 5GHz radio signals are pretty much the same; 60GHz doesn't go through walls, but that's an order of magnitude higher frequency). The problem with 5GHz Wifi is that only some channels allow 2.4GHz-equivalent power levels, and access points are really dumb about auto-selecting them. So if you think 5GHz doesn't go through walls, try changing to a high-power channel. 149 is a good one to try, as it's high-power and has adjacent channels to steal for 80MHz 802.11ac. (The low channels are about 20x less powerful than the high channels. That's why people think 5GHz doesn't go through walls. Those low channels don't.)

88 points by mahyarm 12y ago

So if they are interrupting my communications, i should be allowed to do the same back, right? Example: Im in a hotel on business and use my mifi-type device for my colleges as my company requests me to do to lower costs. Now, if they block that signal they are interfering with my business needs. So in my book, i should be allowed to block their traffic that is interfering with mine. Or would that be illegal as its on their premises and all that BS...

Klinky 12y ago
Not really. You're renting a space from them, and they can dictate what you're allowed to do in that space. I would say the hotel has the right to ask guests to not use these devices in their rooms, but they should not be actively jamming public frequencies or sending malicious packets to these devices.

memracom 12y ago

Just travel to Canada instead and stay at one of the many hotels that offer free WiFi to all hotel guests. This is the way of the future. Especially for those families with multiple devices. Mom and Dad's laptops, tablets and phone, plus the kids tablets...

_delirium 12y ago

Another discussion of this topic, though on a different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794476

mikestew 12y ago

"Marriott and the hotel association say that if the commission rules against them, some hotels might prohibit guests from checking in with Wi-Fi devices or restrict such equipment from some parts of their properties, a move that would only alienate their customers." IOW, it has nothing to do with "protecting customers from roque networks" as mentioned elsewhere in the article. No, they simply don't want you using equipment that bypasses their usury for WiFi use.

notthemessiah 12y ago
"In October, the F.C.C. fined Marriott $600,000 for preventing customers from using their own Wi-Fi devices at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center in Nashville. The commission said the hotel was charging people attending and exhibiting at a conference $250 to $1,000 per device to connect to the hotel-operated Wi-Fi service. Previously, the F.C.C. prohibited Boston’s Logan International Airport from blocking Wi-Fi networks set up by airline clubs." It's pretty heavily implied by the article that this it intended to prevent circumvention of exorbitant rates.
- eli 12y ago
  And also that it's intended for conference exhibitors, where exorbitant rates for every little additional thing in a booth is part of the deal. A $100 wastepaper basket, for example. Now, if it were up to me they would just price the booths at a fair price per square foot rather than try to make a profit on "extras."
  - vinceguidry 12y ago
    You tend to find this kind of pricing structure in industries where consumers don't want to pay fair up-front prices. Transportation, Keurigs, video games, phone apps, to some extent wireless cell service. You're forced to provide basic access to your service at rates that don't allow you to make a real profit. So you try to make it up in extras. Customers mumble and grouse, try to get by on the minimum level of service, but it's really their fault. You don't have to pay the exorbitant extras, when I fly, I find the lowest fare I can find and limit myself to a small bag with the bare essentials. I do my homework. I don't mind it at all because I'm getting a service I want at a lower price, that I might not have been able to afford otherwise. Capitalism is wonderful.
obstinate 12y ago
I would love to see them try to turn down people who have devices capable of being a WiFi hotspot. That would be, at least, all AT&T customers not on the unlimited plan? Hotels, don't be silly. You would never do that.

Peaker 12y ago

Sounds like material good enough to start a boycott movement?

danuker 12y ago
Indeed. I don't see why laws should be passed when we could simply boycott them.
- michaelhoffman 12y ago
  Laws against willfully or maliciously interfering with authorized wireless communication already exist. Marriott wants a new law passed with a loophole for their specific brand of willful or malicious interference.
eli 12y ago
Worth noting that they're talking about wifi for exhibitors in the convention hall, not in the rooms.
kordless 12y ago
How about we all use Airbnb instead?
baddox 12y ago
Those work better when the industry you're boycotting hasn't succeeded in regulatory capture.
EC1 12y ago
When have boycotts ever worked?

doxcf434 12y ago

Hotel wifi is often flakey and slow, so blocking a potentially better connection is all the more insidious of them.

mgkimsal 12y ago

I was investigating conference locations a few years back, and many people had suggested a local big chain hotel. It was a techish conference, so I inquired about the wifi capabilities. Their 'list rate' (which I was told I could try to negotiate with the regional office) was $25 per person per day. This was outside of whatever charge for "wifi in my hotel room" my guests would pay too. I said "so.. for 150 people, for 2 days, you want me charge me $7500 just for wifi access whether people use it or not?" "Yes sir, that's correct". Yeah, I know, I know, bundle it in to the ticket price, etc, but.... just... there's a line you gotta draw somewhere, and that was it for me. They were off the list at that point.

tw04 12y ago

I find it humorous their solution is to block other people's wifi. How about you just provide wifi that doesn't suck? Stayed at a Hilton in Memphis that I think had 10gbit uplink. It was fast enough that I wouldn't have even considered tethering instead. In most hotels, you're lucky to see 1mbit worth of speed at less than 500ms latency. With a connection like that, it's literally highway robbery if they're allowed to block access points. If I'm traveling for work and need to download an ISO overnight, and I'm unable to because they're blocking it, it should be criminal.

aggie 12y ago
Forgive my lack of a source, but I read a while back that hotel wifi is often so bad because they signed short-sighted contracts in the past that locked them in to these terrible data rates for many years. And now they pass that terrible deal on to their guests. Edit: well I found the 'source' - turns out it was a Hacker News comment, so take it for what it's worth. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8082519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8082519
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  I find it hard to believe that lobbying the FCC is cheaper than paying lawyers to engineer their way out of those contracts. With the crazy fees mentioned in the article for wifi access (seriously, $1000 per device?), it's not hard to see that their "protecting users" line of arguing is BS when there is such a clear profit motive. Also, I totally don't get their strategy here, since it's not like there aren't other hotels which are nicer / cheaper / better-suited to conventions than Marriott. Really hope that they lose a lot of business for trying to pull such a stupid, petty trick to increase profits. In combination with their push to "remind you to tip their maids" so they can pay them less, I'm really excited to watch them burn.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  This was brought up in a recent HN thread (that you just found). The way it feels to me, forgive the profanity - it's assholes that got screwed by other assholes. Signing up for such "short-sighted contracts" is stupid, but offering those in the field of fast-changing technology (and not upgrading them when the technology changes to the point of the contract being ridiculous) feels... evil.

blazespin 12y ago

Hotels should be able to charge whatever they want. If you don't want to pay for wifi, chose another hotel for your conference.

infinotize 12y ago
Read the article again. The issue isn't really about the price for wifi, it's that hotels are blocking the spectrum so you can't set up your own wifi or tether (which is not allowed by the FCC).
bbcbasic 12y ago
Then by the same token they should block cellphones and charge $10 a minute for calls. Also how about bringing the water you purchased outside back to the room? Should be confiscated.
- baddox 12y ago
  If there weren't protectionist regulations that create massive barriers to entry in the hotel industry, neither of those things would be an issue, because any hotel that implemented them would get eaten alive by competitors.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    Are you implying the hotel market isn't competitive? I don't know about the US, but I remember a European hotel investor claim that he usually only invested in hotels after they'd been through 3-4 bankruptcies, because it was first then that the price and debt load had dropped enough for the hotel to have a decent shot at becoming profitable.
    - baddox 12y ago
      I'm implying that the more competitive the hotel market is, the less of a problem customers will have with blatantly ridiculous policies like those mentioned.
  - 12y ago

spankalee 12y ago

How exactly do they block WiFi while simultaneously providing WiFi?

jrockway 12y ago
By telling their access points to send deauth requests to all devices that aren't on their networks. And yup, 802.11 tells devices to deauth even when receiving unencrypted deauth requests from access points the device expects to be encrypted.
- ryan-c 12y ago
  Deauth packets are normally sent in the clear even for encrypted networks, though 802.11w is supposed to fix that eventually.
- vidarh 12y ago
  Sounds like someone is/will get a nice business out of selling tiny little "wifi killer" devices that just continuously sends deauth's to everyone, that can be plugged into some well hidden outlets somewhere when you're not happy with them...
  - AakashPatel 12y ago
    Thankfully some enterprise equipment (I can only speak of Meraki access points) can detect such attacks. So, you could localize (to a degree) where such an attack was coming from based on the AP locations.
- AakashPatel 12y ago
  I do IT for a few hotels and I've never found this feature useful. While I agree it's useful to be able to control RF noise (by annoying someone enough with the deauth packets that they turn off their tethering), it's difficult to differentiate between nearby businesses and homes vs. someone tethering on-site.
  - 12y ago

zw123456 12y ago

Aside from the obviously stupid on the part of the hotels, can't someone just use USB tethering instead of WiFi to connect to their cellular device?

clarkm 12y ago
Yep. On top of that, I'm pretty sure iPhones use bluetooth tethering by default anyways.
AakashPatel 12y ago
Yep, that'd be an alternative.

ryan-c 12y ago

"But the best way for hotels to deal with rogue networks is to inform law enforcement agencies and help them apprehend criminals who are trying to steal information." That's an absurd point to make. One does not even need to run a rouge access point - much traffic is in the clear, and many MitM attacks can be pulled off just using injection. Even if someone were running a rouge access point, it's pretty difficult to track down an exact location (not very hard to figure out what room it's in though) in a crowd without direction finding gear and special equipment. They would get much more sympathy as far as security goes if they were only asking for the right to block rouge access points that have the same ESSID as their official ones.

juliangregorian 12y ago
Okay, given that the security angle is a subterfuge, but let's say you run a hotel with a network named "RyansExorbitantWifi" and I set up a WAP named "RyanWifi-Free". I think we both know it's gonna generate some interest. Then I can serve them fake versions of Facebook, Google, and their bank's login pages, which is a lot wider of an attack vector than trying to sidejack via packet sniffing.
- ryan-c 12y ago
  Enumerating some possibilities, here are things the hotel can do: * Deauth jam nothing * Deauth jam "evil twin" access points only * Deauth jam above plus access points "similar" to the official wifi (have fun trying to prevent homoglyph attacks) * Deauth jam all unofficial unencrypted access points (preventing an attack from monitoring probe requests and spinning up matching fake APs on the fly) perhaps with a whitelist of "known" nearby wireless networks to leave alone * Deauth jam all unofficial WiFi (what they want to do) There's not really much difference from a security standpoint between those last two, though I suppose someone could set up an encrypted rouge network like "FreeWifi - password is swordfish" and/or make flyers for their evil network. Basically, I could empathize with them arguing to jam any open wireless networks, but jamming encrypted wireless networks in the name of security is a major stretch.

skuhn 12y ago

There is a technical basis for concern, although ultimately the problem is of the hotel's own making. You simply cannot have 500 mifi-type devices transmitting data (along with the hotel's actual WAPs) in the same room without major problems. There are only three non-overlapping channels for 2.4Ghz 802.11b/g/n, and mifi devices that I'm familiar with pick a "good" channel on startup -- they don't limit themselves just to the three non-overlapping ones. 5GHz is better, and the decreased ability to pass through walls is likely desirable here. However, your mifi is still broadcasting in 2.4GHz, and wifi clients will fall back to that if they don't like the quality of the 5GHz signal. OS X, for instance, is very finicky about using 5GHz on an SSID that broadcasts for both 2.4/5. Right now I'm approximately 6 feet away from my AP, and my laptop has switched to 2.4GHz. Ultimately though, this whole mess is the fault of the hotel's poor implementation. If their wifi was free or low cost, and worked well, then why wouldn't everyone use it? That people are using their mifi devices says they are being ill served by the existing solution, not that they were just dying to pay AT&T more money and carry around yet another black plastic brick. By providing crappy service, these hotels have created the problem they're complaining about. Either don't do it at all (and save money / hassle to boot), or do it right.

calgoo 12y ago
I would just push for the FCC to release more bandwidth then, so there is no overlapping. Lobby for that instead of making a loophole that will be abused in every possible way.
- skuhn 12y ago
  Agreed, but I don't know if anything can really be done for 2.4GHz at this point.
  - jrockway 12y ago
    Wifi's modulation schemes aren't the best for the real-world 2.4GHz spectrum. They work really well in the lab, and mildly well in the real world. Getting rid of Wifi and replacing it with something else could make unlicensed wireless networking more reliable. LTE-U seems like the way forward here, though it seems there are some industry barriers in the way. (If you make LTE chips and sell them all to cell phone carriers, and they tell you they don't like LTE-U, you probably won't be in a hurry to start selling LTE-U chipsets. Pure speculation.) That said, 5GHz Wifi does pretty well. There is a misconception that 5GHz doesn't go through walls, but that really has no scientific basis (2.4GHz and 5GHz radio signals are pretty much the same; 60GHz doesn't go through walls, but that's an order of magnitude higher frequency). The problem with 5GHz Wifi is that only some channels allow 2.4GHz-equivalent power levels, and access points are really dumb about auto-selecting them. So if you think 5GHz doesn't go through walls, try changing to a high-power channel. 149 is a good one to try, as it's high-power and has adjacent channels to steal for 80MHz 802.11ac. (The low channels are about 20x less powerful than the high channels. That's why people think 5GHz doesn't go through walls. Those low channels don't.)