Can't the spectrum be allocated dynamically, so routers don't "hog airspace" unless someone is actually using it and their TCP connection is actually going up to those speeds?

Well... that’s about software and less about spectrum and the regulation of it.

The problem is the box in the aisle of BestBuy that say “FAST 2.5 Gig WiFi” sells better than “Dynamic Signaling” so the incentive to just make really crappy radios that have more throughout outweighs the incentive to actually make decent and smart software defined radios.

That’s why I think the FCC needs to just set some band rules. They do this already in the commercial WISP space.

>For what it’s worth, there are practically 0 clients capable of handling WiFi 6 in those bands as well. Further, as a person in the industry, I think it’s completely irrelevant to need anyway.

Yes I thought it was clear with the WiFi 6E mention, but turns out not everyone is up to date with things as shown in other replies, so I apologies for the confusion.

I agree with everything you said, but my opinion is it should be down to Wifi to enforce Dynamic Signalling as mandatory in WiFi 6 ( too late now may be WiFi 7 ) spec rather than having regulation. And I thought OFDMA is part of the solution?

If I remember correctly that is what the WiFi 7 / 802.11be committees were looking into. But then again judging from their Opera happening in WiFi 6 I am not too sure if they are capable of doing it.

I live in a high density urban living area and my MacBook currently reads at least 20 AP excluding their 5GHz naming counterparts. So I do feel the pain with crappy WiFi.

That's exactly how wifi works. If there's no data to be transferred, the radio's transmitter is off and it is not using the spectrum. That said, periodic beacons and keepalives defined in various protocols will cause data to be sent from time to time.

Interpreting an SSID closes to me, with 0 activity (noone connects there). According to wireshark, beacon takes 516µs at 6Mbit/s with 40 beacons/s, which equals 500e-6 * 40 = 0.02 = 2% airtime goes to a single SSID with 0 traffic. Typical settings are 10 beacon/s which would be 0.5%, but 2.4Ghz has 1Mbit/s default rate, so about 3%.

With 20 idle SSIDs on 2.4Ghz with default settings, roughly 50% of airtime is spent on SSID broadcast.

We could put a requirement that your signal have a certain meaningful information density.