> On 14 Mar, 2016, at 16:02, [email protected] wrote: > > The WiFi protocols themselves are not a worry of the FCC at all. Modifying > them in software is ok. Just the physical emissions spectrum must be > certified not to be exceeded. > > So as a practical matter, one could even satisfy this rule with an external > filter and power limiter alone, except in part of the 5 GHz band where radios > must turn off if a radar is detected by a specified algorithm. > > That means that the radio software itself could be tasked with a software > filter in the D/A converter that is burned into the chip, and not bypassable. > If the update path requires a key that is secret, that should be enough, as > key based updating is fine for all radios sold for other uses that use > digital modulation using DSP. > > So the problem is that 802.11 chips don't split out the two functions, making > one hard to update.
To put this another way, what we need is a cleaner separation of ISO Layers 1 (physical) and 2 (MAC). The FCC is concerned about locking down Layer 1 for RF compliance. We’re concerned with keeping Layer 2 (and upwards) open for experimentation and improvement. These are compatible goals, at the fundamental level, but there is a practical problem with existing implementations which mix the layers inappropriately. - Jonathan Morton _______________________________________________ Cerowrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
