Your funny Wi-Fi name is secretly ruining your home network

Who doesn't like a creative Wi-Fi network name? You'll always run into someone with a network called "FBI_VAN" or a snarky message to the people in the apartment upstairs. But as much fun as it can be to make up silly Wi-Fi SSIDs (Service Set Identifiers), there are actually a few good reasons why you want to avoid it.

Special characters can break things in surprising ways

Not as much freedom as advertised

SSIDs can be up to 32 bytes in length, although some routers might limit you to shorter names in their firmware. This can include spaces, symbols, and any ASCII characters .

The problem is that, just because you can use almost any character you want, doesn't mean you should do it. Some older devices, or basic cheap IoT devices won't play ball if you have underscores, colons, apostrophes, and other special characters in your SSID.

Typical issues include the SSID not showing up in a list of available networks for that device, or the network appearing, but the devices can't connect. A very annoying issue can happen where a device connects once the first time, and then refuses to connect again.

You can use emojis too

But you shouldn't :(

Thanks to the simple 32-octet limitation of the SSID standard, nothing stops you from putting characters in there that you might never have considered. Technically, you can even put emojis in your SSID or use Japanese kana.

The specific device you are using might limit what characters you are allowed to use, however. Nothing stops your router manufacturer from putting its own boring and arbitrary limits on what characters you can use when creating the SSID. That's not an issue other than being annoying if you wanted to make something wacky, but the real problem happens when you have a client device that can't read the character codes you'd put into the SSID.

It's even worse if you get into a situation where you have to manually type in an SSID on a device that can't see it, probably because it has a weird name. If that device doesn't have the character set to even type the SSID, you're stuck.

If you need another reason not to use emojis in your SSID, remember that although emojis have a standard code to represent each one, there's no standard as to how they are rendered. That's why the smiling emoji doesn't look the same on Android and iPhone, or from one app to the next. So what you intended your emoji-laden SSID to look like to others might be completely different, making the joke pointless.

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Keep it simple, stupid

You probably already figured this out, but the answer is to stick to standard characters only. If you have a fancy router that lets you create multiple SSIDs, it's probably OK to have one that's a bit of a novelty, or if your router allows you to create a guest network and rename it to what you want, that's a safe one to have some fun. The worst that can happen is that your guests can't connect, but at least you can all have a nice chuckle at how creative your SSIDs are.

Besides, it's not hard to have a sidesplitting SSID without resorting to weird characters or ASCII art. The regular alphabet was good enough for Shakespeare, so it's good enough for the rest of us.