Fancy giving your wireless router SSID a personalized emoji treatment? You might ask, is it possible to add and use emojis in your WiFi Internet network name? The quick and short answer is a resounding, YES! Let’s get through the explanation why emoji characters are allowed in your Wi-Fi network name and why you should use or avoid them.
A major determining factor whether you can set up and use an emoji for your WiFi SSID at home is your router device. Most router brands would allow the use of emojis when configuring and setting up your WiFi network name. However, certain firmwares installed on routers may block you from doing so.
How Many Emoji Characters are Allowed to Be Included in a Wi-Fi Network Name or SSID?
If you are certain that your current wireless router won’t restrict custom special characters and accepts emojis as WiFi names, then let’s get it on. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) which governs the 802.11 international standards for Wi-Fi, states that wireless network names must contain characters between 1 and 32 octets long. An octet is equivalent to 8 bits of data.
Since by the UTF-8 Unicode Standard rules, the character set which include emojis, they are officially a valid option to be included in your SSID name. Now, an emoji character accounts for two (2) octets as compared to one (1) octet of your regular letter, number, or symbol. That being the case, you can easily use up to 16 emojis in a single SSID.
Why Should You Not Use Emojis in your WiFi Network Name?
With all the technical delineations above, you surely can use an emoji character in your Wi-Fi SSID or even make all of it emojis. You can tell a story and discard your regular characters and other special symbols altogether. However, there must be a lingering question whether you should really use emoji in this situation. Is it really safe to use it? Will it compromise security and privacy on your wireless network?
Apparently, using an emoji as part of your WiFi name does not constitute weak network security. However, there might be other factors that might force you to accept the fact that Wi-Fi names are meant to be boring.
For instance, there was that iOS 14 bug on iPhones that disabled networks permanently those with the% symbol in the SSID. Another thing to consider is that, sometimes, you need to input the Wi-Fi network name and password manually on your mobile device or computer. And, doing it with emojis might be a nightmare to other users. Lastly, older devices might not be compatible with emojis and could show your SSID differently on the network settings. It could create confusion if you have a number of those devices in your household.
Conclusion
Using emojis on your SSID or WiFi network name is a cool thing to have in this day and age. If you want to take a dab in it, consider the little annoyances we’ve mentioned above and make an informed choice.
Have you tried changing your SSID to emojis? How did it go? You can tell us your story in the comments section below.