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FCC Proposal To Limit Access To 5725-5850 MHz Band
New submitter thittesd0375 (1111917) writes New rules adopted by the FCC will greatly limit the amount of bandwidth available in the unlicensed U-NII band used to deliver internet to rural areas. The filters required to comply with the new rules would shrink the available frequencies from 125MHz to only 45MHz. Petitions to reconsider this ruling can be submitted here and previous petitions can be found here.
We can't have you proles using the available spectrum out in the boonies where no one else is using it.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
According to the FCC's ruling, they did it to stop Wi-Fi signals interfering with Doppler radar systems that use the same frequencies. This doesn't sound like Big Telco or Big Cableco are behind it.
OP said:
> to deliver internet to rural areas
Article says:
> the Commission’s Enforcement Bureau found that certain models of devices certified for use in these bands were designed in a way that users were able
to disable the DFS mechanism. With the DFS mechanism inactive, the device could transmit on an active
radar channel and cause harmful interference.
and:
> Early field studies performed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA’s) Institute for Telecommunications Sciences (ITS) and FAA staff indicated the interference sources were certain unlicensed U-NII devices that operated in the same frequency band as these Federal radar systems. This interference was occurring despite the Commission’s rules that require U-NII devices operating in this band to incorporate an interference mitigation technique called dynamic frequency selection (DFS).
Oh look, people buying illegal 1Watt emitters from China and attaching them to bigass antennae to "deliver internet in rural areas" on fixed channels without DFS when regulations strictly say "nope", now crying that they're being "stepped on".
gtfo.
They're trying to protect Terminal Doppler Weather Radar, they've added restrictions on the upper band but removed the indoor restrictions on the lower (5.2ghz) band. A fair tradeoff in the opinion of someone that used to work at a WISP.
Just because you disagree doesn't mean it's not true.
Actually, if you read the document, there was a pretty substantial pissing match between Globalstar (providers of satellite cell service) and the device manufacturers, over technical details having to do with harmful interference to Globalstar's uplink and downlink.
The whole thing started when it was noted that there were devices in the field interfering with doppler weather radar, and that those devices could transmit outside their assigned frequencies by altering parameters through software.
Among other things, this proposal requires the manufacturers to prevent users from being able to alter the frequencies used so that they are out of their licensed spectrum.
That doesn't travel very far, right? At least not with acceptable power. It's almost microwave!
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Doppler radars cannot work on a satellite as the beam should be almost parallel to the earth's surface. They are used to remotely measure the wind speed and are useful in detecting rotating winds, thus tornadoes.
Um, no. Amateur radio people were also having trouble with this, too. If you needed a good reason, however, interference with radar is a really good reason to limit use of this part of the unlicensed spectrum. Freebies are one thing, but we have to play together or we'll start jamming each other.
Okay, but don't forget to blame Big Weather!
And BTW, I've noticed on my local cable system, The Weather Channel has been replaced by the lamer WeatherNation... could you guys check your TVs to see how big a region that is?
This spectrum was introduced in 1997 to augment the "last mile" cost for rural subscribers, particularly schools and libraries. It doesnt come with license fees and as such is widely used by private industry to provide internet access to paying customers who live in the middle of nowhere (many of whom dont even have cellular service.) the existing bandwidth peaks at a blistering 25mbit.
as an amateur radio enthusiast, U-NII band reform is a long time coming and private companies have a huge incentive to get you to oppose it. thittesd0375 doesnt say it, but these arent petitions you're filing either, they are official FCC proceedings and considered a complaint, which is very different than the change.org crap that shows up on slashdot one a month. holding on to this band plan and its users is an easy way for telecom companies to quietly interfere with projects that would actually help citizens like wimax and municipal gigabit/wireless. If you have any respect or concern for the people being screwed over for 25 megabit service initially intended for public education around the same time AOL was all the rage, you should probably avoid this slashdot article entirely.
Good people go to bed earlier.
The petition from WISPA has a fairly comprehensive summary. http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/docum...
Most of my 2.4 GHz links have been removed from service since the band is so crowded, that even with -50dBm signals the throughput was crap, but one is almost by themselves on 5.8 GHz (almost no 802.11a, a few TDMA stations, mostly AirMAX, around), and can get great throughput and reliability with weaker signals...If I were starting a WISP now, I would do only 5.8 GHz and 24 GHz links.
It's almost microwave!
As far as I'm concerned "microwave" is 2.4 gig. (And maybe lower, but your microwave oven operates around 2.4 gig.) 5 Gig is over twice that. How do you justify the word almost? Where do you think microwave starts???
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I looked at the petition, but all it says is:
Dear Federal Communications Commission:
Stop governmenting, you motherfuckers!
Support my political activism on Patreon.
My father in law is in a rural community. He has hundreds of acres of land and he has to use a wireless provider for internet. But he's also got dark fiber running up to his mailbox. After the cable was laid all over the county, nothing was done with it. How about taking the opportunity to push ISPs to light up that dark fiber for rural areas. If you have telephone service you should also have broadband capability.
"802.llac may help enable higher-bandwidth indoor applications (i.e., video streaming),"
wat
video streaming is not a higher-bandwidth application. It's 10Mbit/s. It's not broken all over the place for lack of edge or indoor bandwidth, you idiots. It's broken by packet loss and unreliable channels indoors, poor buffer management at the edge, and massive strategic oversubscription at the city level by the eyeball monopolies.
... on my local cable system, The Weather Channel has been replaced by the lamer WeatherNation...
There's something lamer than the Weather Channel? Hard to imagine. It was ok (exception noted below) before they tried to be the next Today show, now it's approaching worthless. I don't want endless moronic, idle chitchat, I want the weather.
Exception: whoever thought it was a good idea for the Wx Channel to broadcast all the idiotic reality crap needs to go back to the janitorial crew.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
They measure "wind" speed only if the wind happens to be carrying particulates (e.g., clouds, tornadoes). On a clear day, doppler radar will not show much, even with 50mph wind.
That may effectively put an end to all the Linux based APs (DD-WRT, Tomato, OpenWRT, etc.)
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Presumably only on the U-NII bands, to 802.11a. Other devices would be unaffected by a rule affecting U-NII
I guess this is to prevent software modifications that may be able to increase the power output of a device beyond that permitted by the FCC?
Seems it is about operating beyond the permitted frequency and power:
So a hardware limit to prevent out of band operation would solve the problem; while allowing the software to be controlled by the user. I've no idea how difficult a hardware solution would be, and I can see why it would be more expensive than a software one. If this has been abused, I can see why the FCC would be seeking such a ruling.
U-NNI (5 GHz) bands aren't just "a," they're also "n" and the only option for "ac." Want to run open source on an 802.11ac AP, better get one quick.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
It would also require notching out the TDWR frequencies, instead of allowing them to be used with DFS. I suppose someone could create a fuse controlled radio chip which could be used worldwide, and fuses blown during manufacturing to limit the hardware as required, but somehow I don't think the market is big enough for that to happen anytime soon.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They measure "wind" speed only if the wind happens to be carrying particulates (e.g., clouds, tornadoes). On a clear day, doppler radar will not show much, even with 50mph wind.
True, but no one is really worried about the clear days...
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
But you are concerned about when a storm passes, which you can use radar for. Not because the wind stops, but because the particulates have finished passing over.
No, no need to rush.
They just stop the radio from being modifiable by software in such a way the violates the rules. The radio firmware for radios sold in the US just won't let you use those bands at too high of power.
Guess what, they ALREADY WORK LIKE THIS.
Your OSS router software can't make random changes to the radios currently, never has been able to as there are already laws in effect governing these issues.
Some devices allow you to get buy with more than you should, but thats generally an oversight, and easily fixed in the next hardware revision ... as already happens.
This isn't going to take away your precious, no need to get your panties in a knot.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
No one gives a shit about your crappy little 5.8ghz FPV system. Your toy is not a serious problem.
People who fly anything more than a pre made toy don't use 5.8ghz, it sucks ass for range. 2.4ghz is only marginally better, and anyone who actually cares uses 900mhz.
As was stated if you'd bothered to read, the bandwidth in question is also right around the area used by most doppler radar stations, which means random broadcasts from unregulated devices screw with doppler radar.
Also, again, if you'd bothered to read ... you'd see that the story is actually about the FCC getting irked that some devices allow end users to override existing rules for limiting power and frequency usage in the 5.8ghz band. Basically, because some shitty link sys WAP doesn't properly restrict power/frequency selection in firmware, and it can be configured by the OS to go beyond legal limits, the FCC is cracking down and getting onto manufactures who don't properly lock down their firmware.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Your toy is not a serious problem.
People who fly anything more than a pre made toy don't use 5.8ghz, it sucks ass for range. 2.4ghz is only marginally better, and anyone who actually cares uses 900mhz.
As was stated if you'd bothered to read, the bandwidth in question is also right around the area used by most doppler radar stations, which means random broadcasts from unregulated devices screw with doppler radar.
For sure. Remember though, we are dealing with digital people. While they know their digital, they make a few glaring errors when dealing with RF.
Going to go into a related rant now.......
One of them is the weird idea that somehow, some way, bandwidth is infinite. It isn't. One of the best charts I've ever seen to illustrate this is here:
http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/...
I have a 6 foot version printed out on the wall. I like to invite people to pick out some free space for their digital wifi.
Some times I think that biggest thing 2.4 GHz and above has going for it is that short range. Because that's the only way you are going to be able to stuff all the people who want to run wireless onto wireless - for now.
900 MHz will definitely work better- certainly it penetrates buildings better and travels further. That of course means that it will get crowded all that much more quickly and of course, the lower in frequency the more likely regular propagation effects will occur. I've actually heard digital people talk of using HF frequencies. Nothing like using frequencies where people have communicated around the world on insanely low power levels. So like maybe 500 people will get service worldwide Until Solar activity nukes the band. Working above the MUF can be helpful in some cases. HF is an unruly neighborhood.
Another digital myth is that it will co-exist with everyone else. DIgital signals don't play well with their neighbors, especially those that use weak signals, like GPS or Doppler Radar as you noted. (disclaimer, the doppler radar goes out pretty strong, but comes back fairly weak)
Even the ill fated BPL service, tried to notch out the frequencies of licensed services, like Amateur radio, or trans polar airline flights, but among other things, intermodulation got them interfering anyhow. And the closer to a modulated square wave on the rf signal, the more unwanted signal generation we get. So frequencies get generated in places we don't want them.
Some people have even tried to get the rules rewritten so that licensed services were not allowed to interfere with th eunlicensed ones, but the unlicensed ones were alloed to interfere with the licensed ones. - after it was found out that really low powered radios would knock out a BPL service for miles around. Insanity. Finally to the dismay of Facebook checkers and pr0n watchers and their smartphones and the other wifi users, a day of reckoning cometh. As more and more of us put more and more on wireless, there will be less and less space availble to use. We might try workarounds like spread spectrum, (watch the noise floor) but I'm pretty certain that eventually we'll go back to wire or fiber, in a "last feet' setup and use IR wireless routers in every room. There really won't be much else to do for it, lest we go without.
Yikes, I got a little long winded there, Sorry about that! But we're dealing with people who need a little more study about what they are proposing. It's disheartening to read about efforts that I know will fail by the time I hit the second paragraph.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
You say this as we watch a train wreck of unintended consequences fall out from a 21 year old law.
UNII isn't even on Comcast's or AT&T's radar. It's viable competition only where other Tier 1 providers won't go.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
Most FPV transmitters are at 5.8Ghz. Used to be important that you were hitting this as close to 5800Mhz as possible so as to stay in the middle of the ISM band. Really hard to believe these 500mw transmitters can cause a signature on Doppler when most times they drop useable signal after 1200 meters.
It does seem that the FCC and the FAA are working together on this. The FAA specifically targeting FPV last week, and now the FCC trying to take back the same radio band this week.
Another happy independence day in the land of the free and the home of the brave...
In principle I would agree, however, the idea of parking this nuanced distinction on the desk of a regulatory bureaucrat makes my neck hairs stand at attention.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
So if one guy uses a gun in a crime, we should limit all gun owners? This smells of big business crushing the little guy.