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Pentagon and Wi-Fi Deal Reached
byteCoder writes "CNet reports that the US Military and the Wi-Fi manufacturers have struck an agreement on reducing the interference on military radars by Wi-Fi equipment. Basically, future wireless equipment will detect the presence of military radar and not transmit over the top of it. Additionally, as part of the compromise, defense officials will endorse the doubling of the number of allowed wireless frequencies--thus opening more spectrum to wireless users (as long as the FCC and Congress agree)."
This is a great example of a win-win scenario. Seems perfectly reasonable to me and the results can benefit everyone. More frequencies, more channels, easier to cover a building, etc...
What a novel idea.
More frequencies good... the military getting into consumer products, seems bad in general though this doesn't seem that harmful.
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Will WiFi equipment be able to tell the difference between military radar, police department radar, and other forms of non-WiFi radiation in the relevant frequency ranges? Will WiFi stop working if I wardrive near a police car? Will it stop working if a police car drives by my house?
Does this "agreement" allow anyone who wants to suppress the use of WiFi to turn on a device that simulates 'military radar"?
Just wondering.
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I guess this means the military won't be using 802.11 anytime soon... It would be a little tough for them to use it if their own radars keep turning it off!
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Saddam: "I wonder how close those Americans are... I know, break out the access points!"
Isn't that a little dangerous for military secrecy? I mean, anyone can now take a wireless transmitter and modify it to detect military radar. As technology grows more and more connected, will we someday see people remotely using the cellphone transmitter on a military base or any sensitive area in order to look for flaws and holes in radar coverage? Just a thought.
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A chapter in Lawrence Lessig's latest book, The Future of Ideas, covers the topic of spectrum as a controlled commons. Many feel with modern technology it should be de-regulated and simply sold to any of the highest bidders. Interference with military transmissions has been one key arguing point. His book discusses it well and raises the argument for easing government control of the spectrum commons. I highly recommend the book for anyone interesting in the ideas of the internet as a commons and how it should or should not be controlled.
Developers: We can use your help.
I live just over a mile from DMAFB, and I can't help but wonder how well my in-house wireless will react to this. I'm less than 300 ft. from a road military vehicles frequent, although presumably without radar turned on.
Perhaps it's time to grab an 802.11g access point before they are all military radar friendly. Or will the long term result be a ban on non-friendly access points?
I suppose time will tell. It has a habit of doing that.
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
Basically, future wireless equipment will detect the presence of military radar and not transmit over the top of it.
Until I hack my gateway to not only detect the presence of military radar but to purposely transmit over top of it.
You probably don't need a souped up access point to detect radar. By nature of the system, active broadcasting, anyone with a RF meter can find it. Just set it to the proper frequency, and you are set.
if the army takes away my wireless, how will i play America's Army online?
Will WiFi stop working if I wardrive near a police car? Will it stop working if a police car drives by my house?
Since the cops have a speed trap right behind my house (about 30 feet from my kitchen wall), it looks like I'm going to have to cover my entire house with a Faraday cage.
Last time i checked, police departments should not be broadcasting in the military spectrum.. second, houses don't tend to speed, so there's no reason why the police should beam their radar guns at your house. Third, even if they did, it wouldn't do anything.
Information on police radar guns: "The granddaddy of systems is X band radar... X band operates on the narrow channel from 10.500 to 10.550 gigahertz (GHz)... K band appeared in the seventies and quickly became popular in its deadliest form: a hand held gun featuring an instant on switch. K band operates on a higher-frequency channel from 24.050 to 24.250 GHz... In 1989, photo radar appeared on the scene, and it was bad news for motorists--it operated on a frequency that was undetectable by existing radar detectors. The FCC set up a channel for photo-radar from 34.200 to 34.400 GHz, which lies within the wide Ka band... Which brings us to the Stalker, the latest wrinkle in hand-held radar guns. It operates on the Ka band anywhere from 34.200 to 35.200 GHz."
Here is another informative article on how the Wi-Fi is colliding with the millitary radar, down at 5 GHz side of the spectrum, specifically 5.150-5.350 GHz.
Thus, police radar should never affect Wi-Fi, and vice versa.
This seems like a win-win situation -- it doesn't have many technical details, but since the radar and WiFi spectrums overlap only somewhat, i'm guessing that WiFi devices will simply use the NON-overlapping spectrum with some safe zone when they detect radar. Which makes sense anyways, since interference would work on both the radar and the WiFi. It may reduce range or data rates but this seems like a pretty good way to solve the problem without having to get congress or the FCC involved. And adding more spectrum in the 2.4Ghz range might solve a lot more range/bandwidth problems than just those of military radar.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Anything that keeps the existing big money players in place will be fine, but anything that smacks of increasing freedoms of speech and fair use --AKA market disruption-- will get the smack down from one or another federal agency. Commerce recently advised the FCC to ban the import of 802.11a devices intended for outdoor use citing air traffic concerns. Reaching an accord with the Pentagon is nice, but it's a small battle in a much larger war.
Surely if it were a 'real' problem, the military would have to find some other way of using their radar. So ok, the noise interference from many civilians is a hard thing for an attacer to create from scratch, but we've allready seen that 'asking' people not to jam GPS signals isn't going to work.
Wasn't there supposed to be some sort of lighting system that was going to interfere with WiFi frequencies? How does the military feel about that?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Which electronic magazine (or Phrack ?) will be the first to publish "Build your own WiFi scrambler/silencer for under 20 bucks" article.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
The military will have the ability to shut down any wireless network by a simple transmission.
Sweet. For them anyway....
I can just see the spam in Sadam's mailbox. Radar jammer for under a hundred dollars.
;-)
Doesn't anybody find this totally rediculous? A low powered device that barely goes through a brick wall, that supposedly interferes with military radar that's designed to deal with jamming in the megawatt range. So are we going to ask our enemys to please not use WiFi equipment? Does that mean civilian radar works better?
Or is this Bush doing the telcoms a favor? Who wants all that competition anyway?
Yes I know, totally paranoid. But WiFi interferring with military radar???
With thousands of Wi Fi transmitters around, couldn't the military use passive radar technology?
You need to send out a pulse of radio waves to capture the echo off of metal objects. If there are enough transmitters out there you might not need to send a pulse. You might be able to read the echo off of objects using the thousands of transmitters around it. You'd be able to use radar but keep your emissions to zero!
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reducing the interference on military radars by Wi-Fi equipment
Investigate Best Buy! It's kind of pathetic when all Saddam and the rest of the United States' enemies need to do is pop down to Best Buy and buy a wireless hub to protect themselves from the military might of world's largest army.
All the Iraqi airforce needs to do now is jetison wireless hubs and GeForce FX cards and they'll be immune to both radar and heat-seeking missiles.
What's next? CAT-5 cable found to defeat stealth technology?
The vast majority of earth's landmass is covered by military radars, most of the times by a multitude of radars overlapping each other. Many of those radars have a radius that exceed some hundreds of miles. Now, wherever someone fires up a future wifi-card, it WILL pick up those distant signals, so, will there be a threshold involved that overrides the whole "detect radar" thingie, or will wifi cards all over the planet stop working just because they detect a radar 500 miles away?
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You are dealing with Corporations. american Corporations at that.
How long before Corporation A decides to get into a price war with Corp B, and sees the military radar detection as a cost savings removal?
Also, how many customers will give a rats ass about some military Radar? They will demand full power.
all in all this is utter nonsense. WiFi uses only the public bands which are already used by cordless telephones and remote control cars, etc. Is their a deal with the cordless phone companies as well???
Im baffled at what this is really about.
All of the above is supposition on the submitter's part, and NONE of it is referenced in teh article. First of all, the article says >
Nothing about 'detecting' military radar, and nothing about shutting down transmission when it does. Next up we have Pentagon endorsement of the Boxer/Allen Broaband Jumpstart Act which will open up an add'l 255MHz in the 5GHz band. Well, the article doesn't say anything about that either - all we've got is this quote:
Which is from One of the bill's sponsors (Boxer) - not the DOD!
Oh, and just in case you were wondering - None of this applies to existing 2.4GHz wireless gear...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
Let me get this straight: new 802.11 equipment (typical output: 1 watt) is going to shut the hell up whenever it detects military radar transmsisions (typical output: 1 kilowatt).
What the hell for? Wouldn't radar signals squelch the hell out of any wi-fi carrier around? Even if wi-fi did manage to interfere with military radar, how can you confuse a weak, intermittent signal (wi-fi is spread-spectrum, remember) with a radar return?
Of course, as for the newly-created vulnerability of wireless access points to radar noise...I'm sure that homeland security (and other unsavory types) would *never* use this feature irresponsibly....say, in order to disrupt a potential terrorist's communications.
I'm equally sure that no enterprising young hacker out there with some basic RF skills would *ever* produce a wi-fi jamming device that mimicked the signature of military radar, but with much less amplification.
1. Get a promiscuous 802.11 card
2. Generate large amounts of garbage, and broadcast it across said card on random MAC addresses
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!
"No one is entirely happy, and that's the essence of compromise," Intel spokesman Peter Pitsch said.
.. And the military busts down your front door for violating numerous FCC rules.
You all miss the point. Our enemies don't mind the military busting down their doors. Giving them an easy off the shelf military use finder, possible jammer, just doesn't seem smart. Imagine a (insert hostile foreign power here) warshhip decked out with linksys waps jamming all the radar.
Let's make a deal: I'll recommend that you be allowed to use { that spectrum | those machines } as long as you { agree to abandon it | give me the root password } whenever I demand it. Sounds like a good deal to you?
While it may seem like a good way to get more spectrum for "unlicensed" (i.e.: first come, first served) uses, what this really amounts to is trading the limited "level-playing-field" spectrum for a bit more spectrum which can be shut down by military (or other governmental) interests at any time.
So before you jump on the "this is great" bandwagon, think carefully; what will be the checks and balances to prevent a shutdown by the military for non-military reasons? Will access to the this spectrum be considered a guaranteed right (ala Free Speech) of a privlege granted at the pleasure of whatever administration happens to be in power at the moment?
The thing about things we don't know is we often don't know we don't know them.
Does this mean that you'll have Iraq solders running around with Pringle's cans scouting the radar sites out for Scuds to hit?
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This could prove to be somewhat of a fallback for Wi-Fi. Currently, the 2.4 GHz 802.11b and 802.11g standards seem to be doing very well. Much has been said about the 5 GHz 802.11a being a standard that would hold for the long run.
802.11a, at 5 GHz, is limited in coverage range. Throughput drops off sharply at the edge as well.
The resolution calls for almost doubling the 5 GHz bandwidth, while leaving 2.4 GHz the same. There is also no radio or antenna compatability between 2.4 and 5 GHz.
I can see this taking our beloved "Wi-Fi Metropolitan Area Networks" and turning them into Wi-Fi lans. Something the government would probably like.
Consarnd it!
I think you are missing the point here. The military doesn't want civilian WiFi interfering with radar in any shape or form to keep nasty things from happening, ie planes colliding, messed up radar guided ILS landing, etc. They also don't want to have to deal with any "ghosting" (I just made that term up so don't whale on me for misusing it) in case of a suicide attack or something similar.
Of course our enemies are going to do their best to cause harm to military aircraft. I don't mind giving up a few bands on the spectrum to help insure there isn't an accident (figher plane crashing into my house and the like.
dont worry, the cell phone companies will buy the frequencies.
We won't have a civilized world until the military stops interfering with Wi-Fi, not the other way around.
The FAA is responsible for air coverage within the U.S., they assume aircraft want to be tracked. The limitations associated with this were apparent on 9/11. The FAA lost track of the fourth hijacked aircraft because it descended below radar coverage.
For those who say Saddam can buy a radar detector at Best Buy, this is no big deal. Radar is radio waves, all you need to build is a radio to detect radar. This technology is about a hundred years old. Furthermore, Saddam can buy radar warning detectors on the open market. He can also buy radar jammers. Many countries build and sell them. See for example the recent stories about GPS jammers that he supposedly has.
The real problem is what to do with radar warning receivers and jammers. Say you detect a radar. If you jam it, the enemy knows he has been detected and can take evasive action. If you do nothing, you leave yourself vulnerable to attack. There are even more complications with missiles such as HARM that can home on radar and jammer emissions. Do you leave the radar on and let a missile guide right to you? If you turn it off, you're blind.
If you look up the frequencies that military radars and various consumer electronics use, you'll find many overlaps. So the military already has to be careful. For example, certain Navy radars use the same frequency band that cellphones use. When Navy ships are close to shore they are required to significantly reduce the amount of power they use to avoid interference. One of the most difficult jobs in the military is frequency management to prevent such interference.
When the idea of 2.4GHz wi-fi interfering with military radar was first posted, it was clearly absurd. Cellphones emmit much more radiation on the same spectrum, and microwave ovens leak yet more still....
So does this mean that future phones and ovens will be designed to stop working when they receive a military radar signal, or is it the case of them singling out wi-fi for some strange reason?
And if more citizens took my attitude on every liberty the government took, the government would think twice each time it tried to bully its masters.
Future Iraqi WiFi devices will detect the presence of military radar and tune their frequency spectrum to transmit on top of it as much as possible.
How is releasing technical details that make this possible a good idea?
What about the vulnerabilities that might come up from limiting the functionality to an external factor such as the presence of a military radar?
I know there are flaws in every datalink protocol, but if we are planning the future standard of wireless networking, might as well not be vulnerable to some moron driving around with a mil radar signal emulator.
There has been scenarios where one attacker would force down a primary connection when the backup connection might be less secure, there has also been scenarios when kiddies would be total nuisances, and those happen quite regularly.
Just playing devil's advocate here -
This was news, about 2 weeks ago, and it was even on Headline news.
Messing with military radar by mimicking the signal has led to serious user harm. Use with caution.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The FCC has determined and allocated some frequency ranges for wireless networking. If the military is already on that band, they had better get off. The FCC rules are very clear about deliberate interference...
Bargain, schmargain. It's not Wifi's problem, it's the military's problem.
It seems to me that military communications needs to exist in hostile environments. One theater of modern warfare is electronic - both active and countermeaures. What does it say about the robustness of military communications that it is easily interfered with by civilians are not even hostile? Sure, pass those regulations but then enemy will be ready with adjusted equipment to wipe out that communication when it needs to.
The DoD needs to shutup about this and fix it's stuff so that is can stand the heat of the kitchen and be battle ready transparent to us all.
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certain major manufacturer] (and in doing so have sold their soul to the
devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of
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