International wireless standards - the opposite of harmonisation

[smasher]

It seems that some of my recent questions inadvertently kicked a hornets nest in terms of what can or can't be discussed here, because of FCC regulations and different wireless standards in different countries.

I'm not looking to debate those topics here.

What I'm curious about, is how can there be so much international effort to "harmonise" everything from pharmaceuticals and accounting methods to food-labels and tariff-codes... But radio spectrums and standards seem to be going in the opposite direction. It's as if there's an invisible regulatory hand that's pushing to make frequencies, spectrums, and power-limits incompatible (to varying degrees) between different countries and regions.

I'm living in a smaller country, and everything from wifi-routers to cordless-phones and CB-radios has it's own special frequency bands and standards, just for this small country. Wouldn't it be better if these devices operated on internationally agreed on and fully compatible standards?

This fragments markets, and increases cost/complexity for everyone. What's the benefit of it? How is making the world a better place when I can't (legally) use my CB-radios in any other countries? How is it making the world a better place that I can't have full/optimal compatibility between wifi clients and APs when I travel?

I don't get it...

 

[ColinTaylor]

What I'm curious about, is how can there be so much international effort to "harmonise" everything from pharmaceuticals and accounting methods to food-labels and tariff-codes... But radio spectrums and standards seem to be going in the opposite direction. It's as if there's an invisible regulatory hand that's pushing to make frequencies, spectrums, and power-limits incompatible (to varying degrees) between different countries and regions.

You don't say where you live, but within the EU there has been (and continues to be) a huge effort to harmonise radio spectrum use. This has been happening for many many years and will continue to be the case. But it's a very slow process, partly because of the preexisting use of the spectrum. You can't suddenly tell 28 countries that they can use frequencies between x and y for WiFi if they're currently used by 5 of those countries for other purposes (e.g. emergency services, aircraft, TV, taxi, etc.). So the speed of implementation is limited to how quickly legacy systems can be moved or shut down, or made to coexist with each other.

Now take those challenges and apply them on a global scale where different countries have vastly different historical use of radio spectrum. Take two of the largest areas, the US and the EU. In the EU we can use 2.4GHz channels 12 and 13 but in the US they can't (well they can in a limited way). So what should you do to "harmonise" that situation? Tell people in the EU to stop using channels 12 and 13? And it's not just frequencies. The 2.4GHz channels in the US can operate at a much higher power than those in the EU. So are you going to tell the US to reduce their power output just so that they're harmonised with the EU?

How is it making the world a better place that I can't have full/optimal compatibility between wifi clients and APs when I travel?

This is generally not an issue for WiFi clients (which are effectively globally compatible) because the client will only operate on the channels dictated to it by the AP. And the clients operate at a very low power level, typically 60mW. That said, I've come across numerous 2.4GHz clients that didn't work on channels 12 and 13, presumably because their American manufacturer wasn't aware of the existence of anything outside the US.

 

[sfx2000]

ITU-R (a UN sponsored agency) works to harmonize where and when possible, but it's not always possible...

Primary regulatory drivers in RF space are FCC and the EU RE-D, and then one has country specific items due to RF planning in that country with incumbent users when a new RF technology may be introduced.

(For example, Industry Canada has regulations that track very close to FCC, close enough that testing for FCC, and then applying for IC approval is largely paperwork and review.)

There are some exceptions - Japan and China, for example, have very specific things to cover. Same would apply to some degree with Israel where exceptions are in place due to military radio and radar user already there.

There has been success in some areas - ISM and UNII-1 for example, are generally available around the world - I would posit that 3GPP tech like UMTS and LTE have had their success, and DECT for cordless phones has some regional impact, but mostly it's rebanding a chipset as needed for the market.

 

[RMerlin]

When dealing with radio frequencies, one of the problems is that not every country has the same existing usage of bands. For instance, one country might have their army use a specific radio band for radar purposes, while that same band may be open and currently unused in another country.

Also, different countries have different situation. Population density in Japan is very different to in Canada, therefore maximum power output for civilian equipment might potentially require to be set lower to avoid interference.

 

[smasher]

Thanks for those answers. And yeah, wifi is ostensibly a global standard, but there's a lot of footnotes and exceptions that are country/region specific. As it relates to my problems with hardware and what I'm "allowed" to talk about in these forums, if there was real harmonisation on wifi protocols, it really wouldn't matter so much if FCC required products sold in the US to be "locked down" to certain specs. The problem for me is trying to get hardware from overseas fully compliant with local regulations.

So y'all see a light at the end of the tunnel? Spectrum allocation in general, and wifi standards in particular, are moving towards harmonisation?

 

[umarmung]

There are plenty of legal unlocked devices and device variants on the market, e.g. every WiFi model from Mikrotik, one of the largest WISP providers, has an international variant that allows you to test almost any part of the common radio spectrum. Even from the US, including on Amazon, you can place orders for such as long you request it from the vendor early enough. This is publicly stated on the site.

Another example of strange intersections between regulations and technology: some of the biggest networking vendors -- such as Cisco, Aruba, Ruckus (oddly enough not Mikrotik) -- sell WiFi access points that are capable of aggressively knocking out other access points sharing their spectrum. These are labelled as an enterprise feature for managing rogue APs or forcing switching between networks. As far as I am aware this should be problematic to at least some wireless regulators, but somehow it very much continues to exist, and this is in the enterprise space!

Given I have no idea about the detail of US or global regulations and laws, so I cannot state with certainty, but I do think the situation is never as clear cut as many would like to believe. Technology is a highly dynamic and moving regulatory target, and the markets are far more global than they ever were before. It also takes a long time for legal changes to ripple through industry and society in general, often requiring strong legal precedents in specific areas before players actually sit up and take notice.

As for harmonization, especially regarding the electromagnetic spectrum usage, it is too dependent on multiple factors, many of them deep-seated, and it often does take so long to change that the technology itself will have long evolved before major global impact of it is felt. The exception seems to be anything that can be done purely in software or, of course, is fundamental to science.

 

[MichaelCG]

Another example of strange intersections between regulations and technology: some of the biggest networking vendors -- such as Cisco, Aruba, Ruckus (oddly enough not Mikrotik) -- sell WiFi access points that are capable of aggressively knocking out other access points sharing their spectrum. These are labelled as an enterprise feature for managing rogue APs or forcing switching between networks. As far as I am aware this should be problematic to at least some wireless regulators, but somehow it very much continues to exist, and this is in the enterprise space!

It is an Enterprise feature since there are properties that have a zero WiFi policy or a zero 3rd party WiFi policy they wish to enforce on their private property. It doesn't "blast" or "interfere" with the spectrum itself. What they do is just send disassociate frames to the clients that try to connect to the "rogue" WiFi. If you are a legit client and AP, no interference at all.

I previously worked for a financial institution that used this feature. There was not a single business use case that supported the use of WiFi at the time, so we actively prevented clients within our confines from using it. "Usually" we got an alert first, a best guess on the building maps where the offender was, and we would physically walk there and find out what was going on. We rarely engaged the auto-block features. Keep in mind, this was 10 years ago and the Enterprise postures towards WiFi have changed as have some of the legal postures. One day we got an alert that a MiFi device was running at our HQ building. Within 5 minutes we had found the group of people in a large conference room and had them shut it down. Turns out it was our external auditors who were doing an unannounced audit on some of our security processes and were impressed how quickly we arrived. Again....different times.