“Chairman Carr’s moves today are very unfortunate as they further signal that the Commission is no longer prioritizing closing the digital divide,” Schwartzman said. “In the 21st Century, education doesn’t stop when a student leaves school and today’s actions could lead to many students having a tougher time completing homework assignments because their families lack Internet access.”
Biden FCC expanded school and library program
Under then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC expanded its E-Rate program in 2024 to let schools and libraries use Universal Service funding to lend out Wi-Fi hotspots and services that could be used off-premises. The FCC previously distributed Wi-Fi hotspots and other Internet access technology under pandemic-related spending authorized by Congress in 2021, but that program ended. The new hotspot lending program was supposed to begin this year.
Carr argues that when the Congressionally approved program ended, the FCC lost its authority to fund Wi-Fi hotspots for use outside of schools and libraries. “I dissented from both decisions at the time, and I am now pleased to circulate these two items, which will end the FCC’s illegal funding [of] unsupervised screen time for young kids,” he said.
Under Rosenworcel, the FCC said the Communications Act gives it “broad and flexible authority to establish rules governing the equipment and services that will be supported for eligible schools and libraries, as well as to design the specific mechanisms of support.”
The E-Rate program can continue providing telecom services to schools and libraries despite the hotspot component being axed. E-Rate disbursed about $1.75 billion in 2024, but could spend more based on demand because it has a funding cap of about $5 billion per year. E-Rate and other Universal Service programs are paid for through fees imposed on phone companies, which typically pass the cost on to consumers.
The Trump administration’s plans to improve Americans’ health will include a push to review the safety of electromagnetic radiation, echoing long-held conspiracy theories and falsehoods about Wi-Fi and 5G touted by health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
On Friday, Politico obtained a draft version of the “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy,” a highly anticipated report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission intended to steer the administration’s health policy. The report, which has not been adopted by the White House, is being viewed as friendly to industry, and it contains little to no policy recommendations or proposed regulations. For instance, it includes no proposed restrictions on pesticides or ultra-processed foods, which are top priorities of the MAHA movement.
Otherwise, the document mainly rehashes the talking points and priorities of Kennedy’s health crusades. That includes attacking water fluoridation, casting doubt on the safety of childhood vaccines, pushing for more physical activity in children to reduce chronic diseases, getting rid of synthetic food dyes, and claiming that children are being overprescribed medications.
Notably, the report does not mention the leading causes of death for American children, which are firearms and motor vehicle accidents. Cancer, another top killer, is only mentioned in the context of pushing new AI technologies at the National Institutes of Health. Poisonings, another top killer, are also not mentioned explicitly.
While the importance of water quality is raised in the report, it’s only in the context of fluoride and not of any other key contaminants, such as lead or PFAS. And although the draft strategy will prioritize “whole, minimally processed foods,” it offers no strategy for reducing the proportion of ultra-processed food (UPF) in Americans’ diets. The strategy merely aims to come up with a “government-wide definition” for UPF to guide future research and policies.
Cruz bill could take 6 GHz spectrum away from Wi-Fi, give it to mobile carriers.
Credit: Getty Image | BlackJack3D
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. The plan would benefit AT&T, which is based in Cruz’s home state, along with Verizon and T-Mobile.
Cruz’s proposal revives a years-old controversy over whether the entire 6 GHz band should be devoted to Wi-Fi, which can use the large spectrum band for faster speeds than networks that rely solely on the 2.4 and 5 GHz bands. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation that would require spectrum to be auctioned off for full-power, commercially licensed use, and the question is where that spectrum will come from.
When the House of Representatives passed its so-called “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. The Cruz bill is also controversial because it would penalize states that regulate artificial intelligence.
Instead of excluding the 6 GHz band from auctions, Cruz’s bill would instead exclude the 7.4–8.4 GHz band used by the military. Under conditions set by the bill, it could be hard for the Commerce Department and Federal Communications Commission to fulfill the Congressional mandate without taking some spectrum away from Wi-Fi.
The agencies will have to take spectrum “from somebody who you can take it away from,” Harold Feld, senior VP of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars.
“The most vulnerable non-federal bands”
The Cruz plan could take 200 MHz or more away from the 1,200 MHz currently allocated to Wi-Fi between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz. It could also take spectrum from the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which goes from 3.55 to 3.7 GHz. (See this previous article for a much longer discussion of CBRS.)
Michael Calabrese of New America’s Open Technology Institute told Ars that 6 GHz and CBRS “are the most vulnerable non-federal bands for reallocation and auction.” While the spectrum for auctions is to come from frequencies between 1.3 and 10.5 GHz, much of that spectrum will be off-limits either because it’s specifically excluded or because it would be more difficult to reallocate.
“About half the spectrum in that range is federal, and then the rest has already been auctioned for cellular mobile use or is assigned to other critical users such as aviation and satellites,” said Calabrese, who directs the Open Technology Institute’s Wireless Future Project.
Another factor cited by Calabrese is that the FCC, under Chairman Brendan Carr, is looking to make new spectrum available to low-Earth orbit satellites like those used by Elon Musk’s Starlink network. Carr is also “the leading champion of 5G in the mobile industry” and inclined to devote more frequencies to mobile carriers, Calabrese said.
Wi-Fi bottleneck
Feld said the 6 GHz Wi-Fi spectrum would be a likely target because deployments in the band are just starting. By contrast, the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands have been allocated to Wi-Fi for a long time, are heavily used, and modifying existing devices to stop using parts of the bands would be impractical.
Arguing that 6 GHz is crucial for Wi-Fi’s future, Calabrese said that “the bottleneck limiting home and business broadband capacity is no longer the Internet connection, but the quality of the Wi-Fi. Most Wi-Fi still relies on a much smaller amount of unlicensed spectrum at 2.4 and 5 GHz, which limits throughput to about 400Mbps and connects fewer devices to the same access point.”
The Wi-Fi 6E standard adds support for 6 GHz spectrum, and the in-development Wi-Fi 7 will take full advantage of the band, Calabrese said. “By leveraging access to the entire 6 GHz band, Wi-Fi 7 can nearly double speeds, support hundreds of devices in a location, prioritize lag-sensitive applications like real-time video, and support emerging future apps such as virtual reality and telepresence that will be used almost entirely indoors,” he said.
We contacted Cruz’s office last week about his bill’s potential impact on Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz band but did not receive a response.
Ajit Pai’s FCC allocated 6 GHz to Wi-Fi
The 6 GHz band was allocated to Wi-Fi in April 2020 under then-FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, during the first Trump administration. CTIA-The Wireless Association, the major lobby group representing mobile carriers seeking more exclusive licenses, argued that Wi-Fi didn’t need the entire band. The CTIA called it a “6 GHz giveaway,” saying that “cable, Facebook, and Google are demanding more than double the 6 GHz spectrum that other nations are considering making available for services like Wi-Fi.”
Pai—who is now the president and CEO of CTIA—rejected the group’s arguments in the April 2020 decision. The Pai FCC’s order said that “providing new opportunities for unlicensed operations across the entire 6 GHz band can help address the critical need for providing additional spectrum resources for unlicensed operations,” and enable use of “several 160-megahertz channels as well as 320-megahertz channels.”
Making the whole band available for Wi-Fi “promotes more efficient and productive use of the spectrum,” whereas “repurposing large portions of the 6 GHz band for new licensed services would diminish the benefits of such use to the American public,” the Pai FCC said. With home Internet services providing gigabit speeds, Wi-Fi needed more spectrum to avoid becoming “the bottleneck for faster speeds at home,” the FCC said.
Now that he’s CEO of the CTIA, Pai is leading the primary group that is pushing for 6 GHz to be partially reallocated to mobile carriers. When contacted by Ars, a CTIA spokesperson said last week that the “upper 6 GHz band is the next global 5G band,” and that many countries are “using or planning to use at least the upper part of the band (6.425–7.125 GHz) for licensed commercial use.”
CTIA also said that Wi-Fi adoption in 6 GHz “is moving very slowly,” citing OpenSignal research, and that the Trump administration and FCC should “consider all possible options to address our spectrum shortfall.”
While CTIA has repeatedly claimed that US carriers are facing a spectrum shortfall, executives at the major telecoms have told investors the opposite. AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches said this month that the company has “no pressing need” to “acquire spectrum in the next 12, 24, even 36 months.” Verizon Consumer Group CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath said in May 2024 that the company has “almost unlimited spectrum.” T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert said in December that “we have lots of spectrum we haven’t put into the fight yet,” as the carrier had only deployed 60 percent of its midband spectrum for 5G.
Divvying up spectrum
The 6 GHz band is not just for Wi-Fi as it is also used for fixed microwave links, satellite services, and certain types of mobile operations. Wi-Fi devices operating in 6 GHz must do so at low power to avoid interfering with incumbent services, and in most of the band must operate indoors only. Currently, Wi-Fi is allowed to use the entire 1,200 MHz band indoors at low power. Outdoor, higher-power use is allowed in 850 of the 1,200 MHz.
While Wi-Fi’s access to 6 GHz is limited, Feld said the band is extremely important. He said that Wi-Fi in 6 GHz needs bigger channels than traditional Wi-Fi had, and that taking part of the band away from Wi-Fi would reduce the number of large channels and require “crowding a lot more devices into a much smaller space.”
The House-approved spectrum plan pertains to frequencies between 1.3 and 10 GHz, while Cruz’s Senate plan is for frequencies between 1.3 and 10.5 GHz. The House would require at least 600 MHz to be auctioned from the entire band. Cruz calls for at least 800 MHz to be auctioned, of which 500 MHz would be taken from federal users. The House and Cruz auction plans both exclude 3.1 to 3.45 GHz, which is used by the military.
For non-federal spectrum, Cruz’s plan says that “not less than 300 megahertz” must be auctioned. This must include at least 100 MHz from 3.98 to 4.2 GHz, but the plan doesn’t specify where the rest of the 300 MHz or more would be taken from.
Because of the “not less than” language, more than 200 MHz could be taken from sources that include the current Wi-Fi and CBRS allocations. Calabrese said he worries that the amount taken from Wi-Fi could be significantly higher than 200 MHz, as “the mobile industry wants much more.”
Big venues need better Wi-Fi
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.”
Calabrese said that enterprise use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies would also be affected. He gave the example of Amazon using indoor Wi-Fi to operate thousands of robots in fulfillment centers. Extending Wi-Fi to 6 GHz is “about connecting the dozens of in-home devices that we can expect in the future as well as supporting the extremely high-bandwidth applications that are emerging for indoor use,” he said.
Calabrese argued that Wi-Fi can make better use of the spectrum than mobile carriers because cellular signals have trouble penetrating walls, and most Internet traffic on mobile devices travels over Wi-Fi instead of cellular networks.
“All the new applications envisioned for both 5G and 6G are inherently indoor applications, and mobile signals don’t penetrate well indoors… Wi-Fi would use the band ubiquitously, indoors and outdoors,” he said.
Taking spectrum from federal users has also fueled concerns about military operations. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, said in a speech last night that the “auction will fundamentally compromise our defense capabilities, while endangering aviation and important federal capabilities like weather forecasting and scientific research.” Drone operations are among the uses that would be compromised, she said.
Feld: People downplaying risk “kidding themselves”
Cable companies are deploying Wi-Fi 7 routers and supporting continued use of the 6 GHz band for Wi-Fi. The CableLabs industry group said the band is particularly crucial in high-density environments, that “any proposals to reduce or repurpose 6 GHz unlicensed spectrum would be devastating to Wi-Fi performance,” and that policymakers should allocate more spectrum for unlicensed use to support the growth of Wi-Fi instead of reallocating spectrum from Wi-Fi to mobile carriers.
Comcast and Charter joined tech companies and advocacy groups in a June 2 letter, organized by the Wi-Fi Alliance industry group, that urged Cruz and other congressional leaders to preserve 6 GHz for Wi-Fi. (Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 12 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast.) Tech companies that signed the letter include HP, Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper, Apple, Amazon, and Meta.
The 6 GHz band is “perfectly suited to indoor networking that is the hallmark of Wi-Fi, while being flexible enough to support targeted outdoor uses… Shipments of 6 GHz-enabled consumer devices in North America, totaling 95 million last year, are expected to reach nearly 370 million per year by 2029,” the letter said.
Aside from that letter, Feld said that cable and tech companies haven’t been particularly active in opposing the potential reallocation of 6 GHz frequencies. “Amazon and the other companies that signed onto this letter, they’re like, ‘well we have a lot of things that we want as part of this bill. We want the tax break. We want other stuff. We’re not willing to get out there and make a big deal about it for fear of pissing off Cruz,'” Feld said.
Feld also speculated that some people think that lawmakers “can’t possibly be serious about pulling back Wi-Fi now that we’re deploying in the band.” In Feld’s opinion, “they’re kidding themselves.”
Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.
Linux and its code are made by people, and people are not with us forever. Over the weekend, a brief message on the Linux kernel mailing list reminded people of just how much one person can mean to a seemingly gargantuan project like Linux, and how quickly they can disappear:
Denise Finger, wife of the deceased, wrote to the Linux Wireless list on Friday evening:
This is to notify you that Larry Finger, one of your developers, passed away on June 21st.
LWN.net reckons that Finger, 84, contributed to 94 Linux kernel releases, or 1,464 commits total, at least since kernel 2.6.16 in 2006 (and when the kernel started using git to track changes). Given the sometimes precarious nature of contributing to the kernel, this is on its own an impressive achievement—especially for someone with no formal computer training, and who considered himself a scientist.
The deepest of trenches: Linux Wi-Fi in the 2000s
That kind of effort is worth celebrating, regardless. But it’s the space that Finger devoted himself to that makes him a notably patient, productive contributor.
Getting Wi-Fi to work on a device running Linux back when Finger started contributing was awful. The chances of your hardware being recognized, activated, and working properly right after install was akin to getting a straight flush in poker. If nobody had gotten around to your wireless chipset yet, you used NDISwrapper, a Windows-interfacing kludge tool that simultaneously made your Linux install less open and yet still painful to install and maintain.
Finger started fixing this with work on Broadcom’s BCM43XX drivers. Broadcom provided no code for its gear, so Finger helped reverse-engineer the necessary specs by manually dumping and reading hardware registers. Along with Broadcom drivers, Finger also provided Realtek drivers. Many commenters across blogs and message boards are noting that their systems are still using pieces of Finger’s code today.
Fixing mainframes, science gear, and RV resorts
Larry Finger, and fish, from his Quora profile.
Quora
Finger doesn’t have a large footprint on the web, outside of his hundreds of kernel commits. He has a page for DRAWxtl, for producing crystal-structure drawings, on his personal domain, but not a general personal page. He sometimes answered Quora questions. He had a GitHub profile, showing more than 100 contributions to projects in 2024.
Perhaps the biggest insight into Finger found in one place is a three-part series for Linux Journal, “Linux in a Windows Workstation Environment,” written in 2005, when he was roughly 65. He summarizes his background: Fortran programmer in 1963, PDP-11 interfaces to scientific instruments in the 1970s, VAX-11/780 work in the early 1980s, and then Unix/Linux systems, until retiring from the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC, in 1999. The mineral Fingerite is named for Finger, whose work in crystallography took him on a fellowship to northern Bavaria, as noted in one Quora answer about the Autobahn.
“At that time, I became a full-time RV resident, dedicated to the avoidance of cold weather,” Finger writes. He and his wife Denise arrived that year at a 55-plus RV community in Mesa, Arizona. He joined the computer club, which had a growing number of Windows PCs sharing a DSL connection through one of the systems running WinGate. A new RV resort owner wanted to expand to 22 workstations, but WinGate licenses for that many would have been expensive for the club. Finger, who was “highly distrustful of using Windows 98 in a mission-critical role,” set to work.
Finger goes on across the series to describe the various ways he upgraded the routing and server capacity of the network, which grew to 38 user stations, Samba shares, a membership database, VPN tunnels, several free RJ-45 ports, and “free Wi-Fi access… throughout the park.”
Lots of people have commented on the broad work Finger did to make Linux usable for more people. A few mention that Finger also mentored people, the kind of work that has exponential effects. “MB” wrote on LWN.net that Finger “mentored other people to get the Broadcom Open Source code into kernel. And I think it was a huge success. And that was only a small part of Larry’s success story.”
In a 2023 Quora response to someone asking if someone without “any formal training in computer science” can “contribute something substantial” to Linux, Finger writes, “I think that I have.” Finger links to the stats for the 6.4 kernel, showing 172,346 lines of his code in it, roughly 0.5% of the total.
I have never taken any courses in Computer Science; however, I have considerable experience in coding, much of which happened when computers were a lot less powerful than today, and it was critical to write code that ran efficiently.
Finger suggests in his response small patches, deep reading of the guidelines, and always using git’s send-email to send patches: “Nothing will get shot down more quickly than a patch submitted from a mailer such as Thunderbird.” Finding typos and errors in comments and text strings can help, especially after translation. Finger advises being patient, expecting criticism about following rules and formats, and to keep plugging away at it.
In another Quora response about kernel driver development, Finger says, “This activity can be highly rewarding, and also equally frustrating!” You should learn C, Finger suggested, and maybe start with analyzing USB drivers, and take your time learning about DMA.
“Do not lose hope,” Finger wrote. “It took me about 2 years before I could do anything more than tell the experts where my system was generating a fault.”
The new headphones look just like earlier leaks showed.
Sonos
Here’s a marketing render of the headphones, showing the physical buttons.
Sonos
And here’s the other side.
Sonos
A view inside the cups.
Sonos
A side view.
Sonos
After months of rumors and leaks, audio brand Sonos has announced and revealed its first foray into personal audio with the Sonos Ace, pricey wireless over-ear headphones that compete with the likes of Apple’s AirPods Max and Sony’s popular WH-1000XM5.
The Bluetooth 5.4 headphones were shown to select press outlets in New York this week. It’s too early to judge their sound quality, but they’re priced at the high end, and Sonos has a good reputation on that front.
Each cup has a 40 mm driver, and there are a total of eight microphones for noise control. Notably, the headphones weigh less than Apple’s AirPods Max.
Like competing pairs, they have high-end features like effective active noise cancelling and aware modes, Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and head tracking. The killer feature is for users who are already using Sonos’ other products in their home theaters: you can quickly switch from playing audio on the Sonos Arc soundbar to the headphones and back. That works for any audio from your TV, including set-top boxes or game consoles.
It’s a bit like how Apple’s AirPods Max work with the Apple TV set-top-boxes. Support for other Sonos soundbars like the second-generation beam is coming later this year.
Additionally, the Ace will get a new feature called “TrueCinema” that leverages your Sonos speakers’ ability to create a 3D map of the room in order to simulate the acoustics of your own space when wearing the headphones and using spatial audio, in theory making it sound even more like you’re just listening on a normal in-room surround system. That feature is also coming later in the year, though.
Of course, the timing for this announcement couldn’t be worse for Sonos. The company is currently tangled up in a consumer backlash after it updated its mobile app but left out several features from the previous version, including accessibility options.
The app update was intended primarily to make it easier to get in and out of the app and to do basic tasks like adjust the volume without waiting on screens to load or taking too many steps—and it succeeds at that, which is long overdue. But it doesn’t have all the edge case features its predecessor does, and Sonos is playing damage control with an angry subset of its normally loyal userbase.
For the Ace, the app is needed to do things like adjust EQ and some other special features, but it’s not required for basic listening tasks like adjusting volume or noise cancellation settings. Thankfully, Sonos has opted for physical buttons for those things instead of either touch gestures or an app interface.
The Sonos Ace will release June 5, and it will cost $549.
