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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

What about all the wifi direct printers?

Inside my house, on 1/3 of an acre (so not up against neighbors), the strongest 2.4GHz signals I see are from 2-3 HP printers in houses around me. This includes my own 2 Ubiquity APs that are inside my house.

I even noticed that I have a device screaming on 5GHz .. an Nvidia Shield. AFAICT, I cannot turn that off, even if I disable wifi.

I hate wifi direct.

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These printers are a bane of my wifi existence too. I live in a suburban neighborhood with overall very little 2.4GHz interference, but there are three HP printers in range which seem to absolutely BLAST their signals.

One of my clients has a Wemo light switch that is stuck blasting its wifi on what must be illegal levels of power, as I can pick it up through two brick walls, across the street, and in another home(!).

Also, none of the other devices that share the same room as the dimmer can use anything on the 2.4GHz spectrum. It's almost impressive how effective a jammer it is.

>Also, none of the other devices that share the same room as the dimmer can use anything on the 2.4GHz spectrum. It's almost impressive how effective a jammer it is.

If it's really as bad as you say it is, you need to report it to the FCC (or other local governing body)

I'll be ripping all of the wemo devices out next week. Then I'll be able to test if it's a one-off, or if they really are that far out of compliance.

Sounds like it’s unconfigured, otherwise it would join its local network.

I once worked somewhere that purchased an individual printer for every user. Talk about a nightmare in costs and consumables. The idea was people would gather around shared workgroup copiers/printers like a watercooler and waste time.

Anyways, having hundreds of these in an office lead to some interesting WiFi scans.

Try ripping the Wi-Fi module out, if you're certain you won't need it. I wish we had free software on those...

The Shield uses WiFi Direct to connect to controllers, so it'd pretty much kill the point of the device if you were to fully disable WiFi Direct on it.

The game controller is in a drawer.. I use a BT Harmony remote to control it. So I could not care less if the controller didn't work.

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