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FCC Orders a Brooklyn Man To Turn Off His Bitcoin Miner Because It Was Interfering With T-Mobile's Wireless Network (arstechnica.com)
A New York City resident was ordered to turn off his bitcoin miner after the Federal Communications Commission discovered that it was interfering with T-Mobile's wireless network. From a report: After receiving a complaint from T-Mobile about interference to its 700MHz LTE network in Brooklyn, New York, FCC agents in November 2017 determined that radio emissions in the 700MHz band were coming from the residence of a man named Victor Rosario. "When the interfering device was turned off the interference ceased," the FCC's enforcement bureau told Rosario in a "Notification of Harmful Interference" yesterday. "You identified the device as an Antminer S5 Bitcoin Miner. The device was generating spurious emissions on frequencies assigned to T-Mobile's broadband network and causing harmful interference." The FCC told Rosario that continued interference with T-Mobile's network while operating the device would be a violation of federal laws "and could subject the operator to severe penalties, including, but not limited to, substantial monetary fines, in rem arrest action to seize the offending radio equipment, and criminal sanctions including imprisonment."
How much you want to bet that the Antminer S5 has no FCC ID, because they never bothered to get one.
He could turn it back on, he just needs to put his miner inside a faraday cage of some kind.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
700 MHz is in the 10s of cm range as far as wavelength. Should be easy to construct some kind of Faraday cage to block the interference (while still allowing for air cooling), with filters on the AC line and Ethernet to prevent them from radiating as antennas.
Function as a useful currency?
Harshly worded letter? They'll fine him $10,000 and then seize the equipment and destroy it. Don't mess with the FCC where interference is concerned, he's lucky they gave him a warning instead of just outright fining him because they could have just hit him with the $10k fine and seized the equipment on the first contact.
Unfortunately, you will probably be modded down as troll or something while "sinij" is modded from +4 to +5 on his wrong answer. CORRECT on your part. Conducted emissions are always half the battle and generally easy to handle with EMI suppressors.
pretty sure TV is a protected service and interfering with it will get you in trouble.
It depends. If the transmitter is actually radiating on the TV channels frequency, then yes, the transmitter can be fined. However, if the problem is that his TV, telephone, and everything else are picking up legally transmitted signals then it is HIS problem.