Tag: wifi

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Your Home Wi-Fi Could Get Slower: Senate Bill Targets Key Frequencies

UPDATE July 3, 2025: The 6GHz WiFi concerns are resolved – the final bill exempts the 5.925-7.125 GHz band from auction. Your home WiFi speeds are safe.

UPDATE July 1. 2025: The Senate passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” and the final version still removes protections for the 6 GHz Wi-Fi band that could slow home internet speeds. The bill now heads back to the House, meaning the threat to Wi-Fi spectrum is closer to becoming law.

If you’ve noticed your Wi-Fi getting faster over the past few years, you can thank the 6 GHz band – a chunk of wireless spectrum that delivers faster speeds than older 2.4 and 5 GHz networks. But a provision buried in the Senate’s budget bill could change that. (See more detail at: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/06/senate-gop-budget-bill-has-little-noticed-provision-that-could-hurt-your-wi-fi/) Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has a plan for spectrum auctions that could take frequencies away from Wi-Fi and reallocate them for the exclusive use of wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile.

When the House of Representatives passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” it excluded all of the frequencies between 5.925 and 7.125 gigahertz from the planned spectrum auctions. But Cruz’s version of the budget reconciliation bill, which is moving quickly toward a final vote, removed the 6 GHz band’s protection from spectrum auctions. This would directly impact how well your home internet works.

For everyone with home WiFi, aka everyone, this matters. The 6 GHz band has been crucial for reducing Wi-Fi congestion, especially in apartment buildings where dozens of networks compete for the same airwaves. If these frequencies get auctioned off to cellular carriers, your router may struggle to maintain the fast, reliable connections you’ve come to expect.

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WiFi Scanner for Mac

There’s a decent WiFi scanning tool built into Mac OS X Mountain Lion. This can be helpful when trying to diagnose interference issues based on channels and signal strength. It’s a bit tricky to find. Go to your hard drive, then the following folders:
System – Library – CoreServices

Then click on the app “WiFi Diagnostics”. Then a window pops up to help you create a diagnostic report. I ignore that and just click on the top menu:
View – WiFi Scan

Then you’ll see this handy program:

Wi-Fi Scanner Mountain Lion

If you use this program a lot, you can drag it to the desktop or your Applications or Utilities folder.

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Turn Off WPS

Most current routers have a feature enabled called WPS, which stands for WiFi Protected Setup. The purpose of WPS is to make it easy to associate devices with your WiFi network. It has two main methods, the push-button method and the PIN method.

Unfortunately, the PIN method is easily cracked, for example with a tool such as Reaver, part of Backtrack 5 as we described.

Therefore you should turn off the WPS Pin in your router. This is usually under “Advanced Router Settings” in your router configuration. This will protect you from a WPS attack allowing someone to get onto your network.

You would check off the box above for “Disable Router’s PIN”.

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Work-Friendly Coffee Shops Around DC

For DC’s working homeless, here’s a post from TBD.com titled “20 work-friendly coffee shops near Washington, D.C. (Map)”:

Whether you can’t stand working in the office, or you just need to find a place to get online and have a drink, you will at some point find yourself looking for a work-friendly coffee shop nearby.

Look no further than this map of 20 highly recommended local coffee shops — praised not only for their blends, but also their WiFi, work space and electrical outlet access.

This advice comes from some laptop-toting users of Quora, a social question-and-answer service, in response to the question, “What are the best work-friendly coffee shops in the Washington DC area?” You can add your own recommendations there, and in the comments below.