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FCC's WiFi Rule-Making: Making It Fair For Both Open Source and Proprietary (fcc.gov)
Bruce Perens writes: The FCC wants to be sure that WiFi drivers don't cause interference with airport weather radars, but their proposal to lock down WiFi firmware, won't fly. Many commenters in the proceeding have made it clear that Open Source firmware for WiFi devices must remain legal. While an "alternative" proposal to the FCC that would require that all WiFi routers be Open Source is getting most of the publicity today, I have proposed another alternative that would be fair for both Open Source and proprietary software. It requires approval of the source code of a WiFi driver by a person with a technical license from FCC, the GROL+Radar, if that driver is to be mass-distributed in binary form for use by RF-naïve users by either the manufacturer or Open Source. The license assures that the responsible person actually understands how to protect radar systems in a WiFi driver. It's pretty easy for someone competent in radio engineering to pass the license test, and many thousands of people hold the license today. Vendors and Open Source are treated the same. It doesn't place restrictions on testing and development, or conversion of WiFi equipment to other radio services. And it includes an explanation of the problem, for those of you who don't know what the uproar is about.
Actually, there are many examples of FCC enforcement against transmitters on certain 5 GHz bands interfering with terminal doppler weather radars: https://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/weather-radar-interference-enforcement. This is actually a real issue.
No, it isn't especially frequent, but it does take place. There are two reasons it isn't more frequent:
1) Most transmitters aren't located in buildings that are high enough to be in the line of sight of airport weather radars. Generally the enforcement actions are against operators of transmitters in or atop tall buildings. Your transmitter a couple of floors above ground is highly unlikely to ever interfere with a radar. And if the radar beam was refracted severely enough for this to occur, there would almost certainly be a lot more interference from ground clutter than your wi-fi transmitter. This is more of an issue in tall buildings. The actual buildings are normally pretty unlikely to cause problems because they are stationary point targets that get filtered as ground clutter. Wi-fi, however, would probably contaminate an entire radial, similar to a sun spike.
2) Transmitters operating on either of the 5.25-5.35 GHz and 5.47-5.725 GHz bands are required to use dynamic frequency selection. They are supposed to listen for the signals transmitted by weather radars and, upon detection, switch to a frequency that does not cause interference.
M-I-Z
kU still sucks!
Are you actually arguing that the FCC, the regulatory body *created* to ensure that the radio spectrum within the United States doesn't become an unusable mess of noise created by overlapping bands, and horribly out of any reasonable spec transmitters blasting white noise everywhere, actually has "no business even being involved in" doing exactly that?
Hint: You don't need the FCC license to *write* the drivers. You don't need the FCC license to *deploy* the drivers. You just need someone with the FCC license to *certify* that the driver complies with existing laws before you can use/deploy devices utilizing those driver. And, to top it all off, the license is neither difficult to get, nor prohibitively expensive, nor limited in quantity.