[Cerowrt-devel] [Bloat] RE : Save WiFi from the FCC - DEADLINE is in 3 days *September* 8

[Mikael Abrahamsson]

On Tue, 8 Sep 2015, Dave Taht wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:22 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
>> On Tue, 8 Sep 2015, Dave Taht wrote:
>>
>>> wifi, and the carriers... which bugs me. 5.x ghz is the people's
>>> spectrum, that we should be free to use any way we want... and to make
>
> Please note that the LTE-U debate is separate from the lockdown
> debate, which only has a day to run. Can we get more letters into the
> FCC for the lockdown problem?

I have already posted as well.

> And jeeze, what makes sense - on the "licensed" spectrum - is the 
> government auctions it off for big bucks one year, and then the public 
> pays rents on it for all eternity. Far saner to have more openly 
> available spectrum

Well, yes, we need both unlicensed and licensed spectrum.

> One failed concept in america, at least, is the idea of a commons - as 
> in a tragedy of the commons - elsewhere, for example, "public lands" are 
> actually "the queen's" lands and people tend to treat them with more 
> respect.

Yes, in sweden we have something called (translated) "Rights of public 
access" to land for instance, I'm allowed to go camping in someone elses 
forest as long as it's noncommercial and I leave it as I found it. It's a 
constant battle to keep this freedom and I agree we need this for radio as 
well. BUT it's not like unlicensed radio today means you can do whatever 
you want, there is still quite a lot of regulation around it. So I can 
understand if they want to achieve that regulated devices in unlicensed 
spectrum actually follows the regulation. The problem is that it's 
different across the world, I've heard that in Thailand for instance, 
you're only allowed to transmit with a total of 100mW from a device, so if 
you turn on both 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, you need to limit them to 50mW 
each (or some combination). How would a completely open device solve this 
problem?

So I think a constructive approach would be to try to say how the FCC 
concern can be solved or at least mitigated in a FOSS world. Do we have 
any ideas?

Because I can understand that regulators whose job it is to make sure 
devices follow the rules have a problem with FOSS code that lets people do 
whatever they want.

Do we really want for regulators to bring back the vans who might roll 
around and impose a fine because you were running OpenWRT and happened to 
set the output power too high for whatever local regulation was in place?

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se