The typical home routers don’t support more than 20-25 simultaneous connections last i checked. I’m sure there must be professional devices that allow thousands of connections like they use in public wifi spots but I’m also sure they would be much pricier.

At this point, it is just a pursuit for understanding how these things work and if what I want can actually be made possible as alternative use case of WiFi, especially given how ubiquitous it is.

Thank you for indulging me nonetheless.

I’m honoured that you took the time to type all this out but it looks like I’ve failed yet again at conveying what I meant to ask and I’ll try to rephrase:

What you have been explaining is broadcasting when all devices are connected to the same network. I want to understand if it is possible to use WiFi just like a radio to broadcast data, without actually connecting. A device can transmit/broadcast, say, a video over the EM waves using some kind of modulation like they do in FM. The receiving devices, like our phones, already have hardware to receive these waves and process it to extract the information. Like I said, it already happens where the SSID of the WiFi transmitter/router is seen by all devices without actually connecting.

And before you say anything, yes I’m aware that it is a very small amount of data being ‘transmitted’ at a very low bitrate. But what is the limiting factor? Why can’t much more data be transmitted this way?

I’m really sorry if there is a silly answer to this as I’m sure there must be. But, like I said, i could never find it in my searches.

Thanks and cheers!

No, I wanted to bring out the irony. Maybe an ‘‽’ would have been better than the ‘?’ I put at the end of my comment.

I’ve wondered for a long time if it is possible to use WiFi as broadcast/multicast? I mean, i understand that it won’t work out of the box, but if one was to write code from ground up (ie different TCP protocol) can it be made possible to, say, transmit video lecture from one WiFi router and for multiple mobile phones to receive and view it without individually being connected to the network. Kind of like how everyone is able to view the SSID of the WiFi node without being connected.

Or is it a hardware level problem that I can’t wrap my head around. I have wanted to understand this for a long time but I don’t have a background in this subject and don’t know the right questions to ask. Even the LLM based search tools have not been of much help.

Didn’t their prime minister recently use a VPN to congratulate Trump on X, which is blocked from access by the same govt?

A scorpion. It stung me between my toes and it was not a big one but hurt pretty bad. I went to the emergency and what scared me more than the sting was the nurse’s insisting on injecting the antidote right where the little guy had u stung. The pain subsided in an hour or so but it felt like I had a bad case of pins and needles on that for for the next few days, incessantly.