On Mon, 14 Mar 2016, Jonathan Morton wrote:
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 problem is that everything (not just in wifi chips, think about 'software
defined networking/datacenter) is moving towards less separation of the
different layers, not more. The benefits of less separation are far more
flexibility, lower costs, and in some cases, the ability to do things that
weren't possible with the separation.
Any position that requires bucking this trend is going to have a very hard time
surviving.
David Lang
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