By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Fears of US congress eyeing 6 GHz for auction overblown, expert says
The Wi-Fi community is on edge these days after the US Senate passed their version of the Big Beautiful Bill mandating the auctioning of 300 MHz of spectrum to mobile operators. But Wi-Fi Evangelist and telecoms regulatory expert Mary Brown says worries about an attack on the current 6 GHz Wi-Fi band have been blown out of proportion. “I believe it is clear that nobody – meaning neither the House of Representatives nor the Senate – wants to auction off the current 6 GHz band. In fact, the advocacy work of the Wi-Fi industry has been successful also in this regard,” Mary Brown says.
She explains that although the Senate’s version of the Big Beautiful Bill (in contrast to the House’s version) doesn’t specifically ring-fence 6 GHz for Wi-Fi it also purposely does not specify where the 200 MHz of spectrum (out of a total of 300 MHz) for auction should come from. “The lack of a specific statement on protecting Wi-Fi’s 6 GHz band in the Senate’s bill may have been taken to mean that the Senate is targeting this band, but there is no indication that this is the case,” Mary Brown says. Also see Mary Brown’s comment on LinkedIn here.
Rogers becomes first Canadian ISP to launch Wi-Fi 7
Unsurprisingly – but perhaps later than expected – Rogers last week became the first Canadian ISP to launch a Wi-Fi 7 service, the company said in a press release here. Rogers Xfinity Wi-Fi 7 (Rogers partners with Comcast for their home connectivity platform) is available in select areas of Calgary, Alberta, and will roll out to the rest of Canada this year, the company says.
The new Rogers Xfinity router “delivers multi-gig symmetrical speeds over Wi-Fi with the ability to connect 200+ devices at one time,” Rogers says. The router is available only with Rogers Xfinity’s Pro 4G plan for 4 Gbps download and 1 Gbps upload speeds. Rogers also says that these are the fastest speeds of any Hybrid Fibre Coax (HFC) network in the world.
Xfinity WiFi Motion raising (mostly invalid) privacy concerns
Comcast has recently added motion detection (using Wi-Fi sensing) to their Xfinity service (and app) and now some commentators are concerned that this could compromise privacy. The new service – according to Cybernews here – allows users to set up three Wi-Fi network devices in the home as sensors to detect motion between them. Some claim there’s an issue because Comcast allegedly is permitted to disclose motion information to third parties, including law enforcement.
The concerns may be disproportionate in that law enforcement much more easily can determine if someone is at home from Internet usage patterns. Comcast says the feature is off by default and is fully controllable by the user. It is not intended to be a security service, Comcast says. Wi-Fi sensing detects motion based on very small fluctuations in Wi-Fi signals but cannot identify individual persons not create a visuals of the environment.
NetAlly’s new SW release delivers improved Wi-Fi 7 visibility and more
Last week NetAlly – makers of the popular AirCheck G3 handheld Wi-Fi tester and more – released their AllyWare™ v2.8 software for the AirCheck G3, CyberScope, EtherScope nXG, and LinkRunner series tools. The new release offers a range of improvements including boosting test throughput to 900 Mbps and supporting Wi-Fi 7 BSSID rate and capability analysis, NetAlly says. “With this release, we’re enabling users to validate Wi-Fi 7 deployments, achieve higher throughput in performance tests, and streamline cloud-based collaboration—all critical needs for modern network teams,” says Julio Petrovitch, Senior Product Manager at NetAlly. For more about the release, also read here.
/Claus.
