Regulatory Fees on the 802.11 Broadcast Spectrum?

Demerara asks: "I live in the Caribbean where I am putting together a business plan for a WISP on St. Lucia. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the St. Lucian National Telecomms Regulatory Commission here licenses and charges fees for 2.4Ghz spread spectrum applications. It's nearly US$400 to apply and, get this, nearly US$800 per link, per *year*. This blows the economics of a WISP out of the water. I may be reading the laws and regulations wrong but I don't think so. For example - they even charge an application fee and an annual license for the 'Family Band' walkie-talkies - look in the fees PDF. I am attempting to find out the following: what international agreements govern spectrum management; what international agreements govern licensing of WiFi or 802.11; and finally, are there any Slashdot readers out there who live in countries where 802.11 technology is also licensed or heavily regulated? The ITU website doesn't seem to answer these questions or, to be fair, I cannot come up with the keywords to find the answers. I'd love to hear from others who use or operate 802.11 under less than 'free' regulatory regimes."

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[theglassishalf]

Well...you are about 25 miles south of Martinique. What are their laws? You could just boost the power and point your antennas due south a la Wolfman Jack... (during the 60s, he broadcast his radio show at "4 times the legal limit" from 4 towers just south of the Mexican border, pointed due north.)

-Daniel

Re:What you have to realize,

[autopr0n]

especially in small countries, is that the government can and do control everything. They can regulate spectrum how they want, and USE how they want.

Heh, it's not like that isn't the case here. After all, all of this came about because someone at the FCC though "Hey, lets take this 2.4 ghz band and let people use it for stuff like garage door openers and cordless phones! (and whatever else they can think up)" It would be just as illegal here to try to setup wifi on the 2.2 ghz band or the 2.5 as it is for him to to use 2.4 over there without paying.

as far as I know, there are no treates dealing with signal use. In fact, one of the things Clear Channel does is broadcast from mexico so that they can circumvent limits on how many radio stations they own.

Anyway, asside from a few windows, all radio spectrum is regulated in the US. Wifi was created to work in those windows, not the other way around. It would be sensible for other countries to have the same windows, but not you can't act like america is better if they don't.

There ARE treaties...

[n1ywb]

There ARE international treaties on spectrum utilization. Except that they tend to take a extremely broad view, and only recognize a few specific services, such as shortwave broadcasting, amateur radio, radar, radio astronomy, etc. The vast majority of frequency allocations are designated for certain general types of use and the implementation is left entirely up to the national governments.

In Great Britain you have to buy a license to legally RECIEVE television channels (may no longer be true).

There are no "windows" of unregulated frequencies in the US. The FCC regulates everything from 30KHz to 300GHz. Some bands are free-er than others, but they are all regulated and all devices which emit radio frequency energy must meet FCC regulations.

It's pretty common for broadcasters to transmit from neighboring countries. The US does it on a global scale, poinding The Voice Of America into evil commie pinko countries all over the world. Just as their are companies transmitting from Mexico into the US, there are also a lot of companies transmitting from the US into Canada. International law DOES specify that signals are only subject to the regulations of the country they originate in. For example, France can't extradite you for transmitting a pro-Nazi tyrade from a US based shortwave station. Fuck Nazi's by the way, it's just the only example I could think of.

International treaties take much less notice of the higher bands, since the only way signals at those frequencies will cross many borders is via satellites. This is a problem for countries like the Canada, that basicly ends up having to copy most of the US's band-plans.

Thankfully, with few exceptions, my ham radio frequencies are protected on a global basis. Now if we could just get those god damn short wave stations off 40 meters...