You can't do that, you can't shift monumental costs on the other party in order to also shift blame for an imaginary problem.
Here we have imaginary problem (wi-fi "interference"), we have FCC who wants to shift blame for it to somebody else, so they try to force measures on users which, if properly enforced, will cost them tens of billions USD in collateral damage.
Because mind you, 99,9% users reinstall their OS a) not to mess with wi-fi, and b) to derive some personal gain from it. Where they got the right to sabotage millions of people?
I don't think the FCC cares if WiFi routers interfere with WiFi. I think they're concerned about modifying the router to work outside of the ISM band, which has other users.
For example, WiFi routers used to be able to operate on the same frequencies as TDWR weather radars. They were supposed to listen to the frequency for a while, and not use it if it was near enough to a radar installation to cause interference. People modified their routers to skip the listening phase, and introduced interference with the weather radars.
Now nobody gets those frequencies. The average hobbyist could apparently not bother to understand the rules or the consequences of their actions.
(TDWR is safety-critical, used to compute surface winds near runways at major airports, giving pilots and ATC critical information about whether or not they could safely attempt a landing. If you hit wind shear 100 feet above the ground, you crash. Your quest for slightly faster WiFi speeds has the ability to kill someone.)
It's a radar system, there is not much it can do if people are transmitting on the same frequencies as it's listening on. It sends out a pulse, it listens for the response. It doesn't know that your WiFi traffic isn't a return signal from a raindrop. And it has to be quite sensitive, because raindrops are small and are not exactly purpose-built radio reflectors.
The previous approach to monitoring for wind shear conditions was to have a surface station at the airport, and hope that the conditions at the surface station were the same along the entire final approach corridor. Sometimes this was true. Sometimes it wasn't and people died. Aviation is a lot safer these days, even though we fly many more planes in the same airspace. Even an imperfect technology adds to the safety calculus.
Giving that safety and capacity up so you can use a shitty low-power low-bandwidth frequency in the 5GHz wifi band is not appealing to me. (There are plenty of full-power, 80MHz-wide frequencies that are WiFi-only. Use those!)
The FCC should have never allowed sharing to begin with. It was nice of them to try, though, given that much of the US is not in interference-range of TDWR stations.
And when open up a spectrum analyzer and look at how much power is on the wifi bands around me, it sure looks like interference is an actual thing. So it seems to me that interference is a real problem, which is why we have the FCC regulating this stuff in the first place.
The right they have, by the way, is that we the people created the FCC to solve the problem of radio interference:
Now it could be that there are better ways to solve the problem. But given the people totally losing their shit in classic "ehrmegerd guvmint steelin my freedums" style, I am wondering if this issue belongs in my bucket labeled "antivax, fiat money, 911 truth, etc".
The "imaginary problem" (I don't know how imaginary it is) is people modifying software so that their devices interfere with other, licensed frequencies.
Personally, I don't think there are many people that will buy an SDR and amplify the signal outside of legal ranges. I also think that any people that will do that are also capable and willing to that without the convenience of SDR.
I can imagine this theoretically being a problem with wifi routers: "Download this custom build of OpenWRT and this custom wifi driver, and you can get wifi without interference from your neighbors".
And when someone proposes a viable technology that could actually work the way Reed contemplates, we can and should review these kinds of regulations.
Right now, today, in the real world, it doesn't matter whether the phenomenon we commonly call interference is a property of radio waves or a property of the receivers we use or the will of benevolent aliens watching us in their lab. The fact is that it causes communications systems not to work properly.
UWB should, in theory, be able to pump a lot more bandwidth down the same wires. Both the cable companies and the phone companies would be salivating at a system that effectively automatically avoids nulls on coax or twisted pair.
However, UWB requires highly accurate, synchronized clocks. Keeping those clocks in sync is non-trivial.
The fact that they could never get it to work over wire means that they had no hope over wireless.
What would be the effect of the Ultrawideband that exists today on other devices using the relevant radio frequencies, absent that regulation? Put another way, what was the justification for imposing such a restrictive rule?
> what was the justification for imposing such a restrictive rule?
This is a totally worthless question to ask about a law or rule.
The general form would be "why was the law created?"
And of course, there's never a law with the (disclosed) purpose of killing all kittens, giving money to friends or destroying an enemy. On the contrary, every law is always spun on some kind of "will you think of the children".
The only good question you can ask about a law:
"What are its consequences?"
Interestingly, your first question was more in this sense.
I believe that Silhouette's question was rhetorical. The answer, of course, is that UWB radio broadcast significantly impair conventional heterodyne radio receivers.
The effect would be an increase in the noise floor. Narrowband incumbents claimed it would be very disruptive, UWB advocates claimed it would be slight. I don't have the expertise to say who's correct, but find myself more suspicious of the side with billions invested in narrowband spectrum that could be made obsolete, and less suspicious of the academic researchers advocating UWB.
Years ago, when CB radio was all the craze, manufacturers would publish manuals with amplifiers tell you NOT to move a certain wire to a certain place because it would change the frequency or boost the power beyond the legal limits of CB operation. This caused all kinds of havoc on those airwaves until the FCC clamped down on them. So, yes they can do that.
Yep. Linear amplifiers are absolutely terrible at spewing noise all over the RF range. Growing up, I lived about a quarter mile from the freeway, and there were times where certain TV channels were absolutely unwatchable due to interference from these rather illegal setups.
CB users also like modifying their equipment to use the amateur bands. Sometimes the 10m band is essentially unusable because of interference from CB users.
The end result is very similar to the WiFi situation, they ruined it for everyone. Now it's difficult for licensed amateur radio operators to buy amplifiers for use with low-power transceivers. The FCC has rules about what the minimum power input to amplifiers can be, and require manufacturers to go to great lengths to prevent the amplifier from working on CB frequencies. This reduces performance and reliability, and increases expense, all to prevent something no licensed amateur would do.
That said, the FCC has only a minimal enforcement budget, so there are plenty of illegal CB amplifiers readily available on eBay. The rules only hurt legitimate American companies and users of licensed radio services.
Here we have imaginary problem (wi-fi "interference"), we have FCC who wants to shift blame for it to somebody else, so they try to force measures on users which, if properly enforced, will cost them tens of billions USD in collateral damage.
Because mind you, 99,9% users reinstall their OS a) not to mess with wi-fi, and b) to derive some personal gain from it. Where they got the right to sabotage millions of people?