Fewer radio trans­mis­sions mean safer and faster radio transmissions

Switching off your Wi-Fi and Blue­tooth doesn’t just mean your devices are safer to use, but also saves energy and makes them faster when they are active.

It is mainly older Wi-Fi and Blue­tooth devices which suffer from vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties enabling hackers to remotely attack them. They are also able to find out a lot about someone by simply recording active radio con­nec­tions. Most devices for instance broad­cast the name of all net­works with which they are to “con­nect auto­mat­i­cally” during start-up. Such net­work names can dis­close quite a lot about someone, since infor­ma­tion like the name of your employer or your favourite cafe can be gleaned from this.

To switch off any radio con­nec­tions you don’t need doesn’t just make you less prone to attacks, but will poten­tially also speed up all other devices’ con­nec­tions within wire­less range. This is for instance due to Wi-Fi devices only attempting to broad­cast if there is cur­rently no other device nearby occu­pying the same channel. The fewer devices there are active on a cer­tain channel, the greater the oppor­tu­nity for them to exchange data with each other.

It is there­fore well worth reg­u­larly switching off any radio con­nec­tions you don’t need, and to only switch them on when actu­ally needed. There may some­times also be an option to do so auto­mat­i­cally. Most Wi-Fi access points for instance can be switched off for a pre­de­fined period (for instance between 00:00 mid­night to 04:00 a.m. in the morning) via a timer function.

Fur­ther infor­ma­tion on Wi-Fi can be found here.