In this article, we explain the purpose of WiFi names and illustrate why you might want to use a WiFi analyzer tool such as NetSpot to reveal nearby WiFi networks and study their names.
WiFi network names, or SSID names if you will, are natural language labels that can be up to 32 bytes long and consist of ASCII and sometimes UTF-8 characters and are used to identify wireless devices.
Just so you know, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. It’s based on the English alphabet and consists of 128 characters encoded into seven-bit integers.
UTF-8 (Unicode Transformation Format) encodes characters and symbols using one to four 8-bit bytes, which is why it doesn’t cover only the English alphabet but also almost all Latin-script alphabets as well as a multitude of historic scripts, mathematical symbols, and emoji.
People can be very creative when it comes to WiFi names, as you’ll see in the next section of this article, but good WiFi names should do more than just catch the attention — they should also clearly identify a wireless network and do so in a way that doesn’t compromise the network’s security.
The most important thing is to always choose a WiFi name that doesn’t give away any personal information. While you might be tempted to make your home WiFi network feel that it’s part of your family by giving it your last name, we advise you not to.
Just imagine how much easier it would be for someone to spy on you if they knew which WiFi network you use. Sounds far-fetched? Then consider that experts expect the number of cyberstalking cases to reach a new record high this year. Even if your digital safety doesn’t concern you, your daughter’s, son’s, or wife’s should.
Some of the best WiFi names are unique enough not to be mistaken for other networks yet sufficiently non-descriptive so that it’s impossible to associate them with any particular individual, family, or organization. That, of course, doesn’t apply to public WiFi networks set up by businesses. Such networks should always carry the names of the businesses behind them.
If you use a WiFi name that isn’t unique, or, worse, stick with the default name, your wireless devices, such as your smartphone or laptop, may connect to a different WiFi network with the same name.
What’s so bad about using someone else’s internet connection to browse the web, you ask? Only the chance that you might connect to a WiFi network that has been deliberately set up by a cybercriminal to lure in unsuspecting users with the intention to steal their private information, such as passwords and credit card numbers.
This technique is called WiFi spoofing, and it’s employed readily around the globe, costing individual computer users and businesses alike hundreds of millions of dollars in damages every year.
More tech-savvy users sometimes like to change the default SSID to what would be the default SSID of a router from a different manufacturer. For example, “Linksys default WiFi” could be changed to “Netgear network home.” The reasoning behind this is that a cybercriminal would be tricked into using wrong hacking tactics, causing them to give up. Some users go a step further and hide their WiFi network altogether to make it invisible to regular users.
Unfortunately, both strategies are nothing but a waste of time. Anyone with a WiFi analyzer such as NetSpot can instantly reveal all nearby wireless network even if they’ve been hidden and see information about the manufacturers of the routers behind them. In fact, a hidden SSID name tells bad guys that they’ve stumbled upon an important network that’s worth their time and effort.
Read here more about top WiFi security tips on how to stop a WiFi hacker from stealing your personal information.
In the beginning of this article, we’ve said that WiFi names and human creativity go hand in hand. In this section, we want to show you just how creative some people can be when it comes to naming their WiFi networks. Maybe some of the names listed below will inspire you to give your WiFi network a cool name as well. If you’re a business, giving your public WiFi a cool name might even get you more customers.
Some WiFi names cleverly prey on people who don’t know much about computer or wireless networks, but they can confuse even experienced IT gurus, especially after a few beers.
There’s no shortage of funny WiFi names on the internet. We’ve select a small sample of funny network names that never fail to create at least a few laughs.
Funny router names can also be pretty cool if they make a clever reference or create an unexpected wordplay.
We hope that this article has shown you that there’s a lot more to WiFi names than most people realize. While WiFi names are obviously not nearly as important as WiFi passwords, it still pays off to pause for a moment when setting up a WiFi network and come up with a name that adheres to the basic WiFi name guidelines described in this article.