Sifry’s Alerts

Time to toot my own horn a bit – Dan Jones, Senior Edior of Unstrung just wrote up an article entitled, Does WLAN pose a health risk? around the issue of 802.11b radio emissions and personal safety, with lots of quotes from yours truly.

The short answer? Maybe — if you are one of the growing band of people who use home-made equipment to increase the range of 802.11b hotspots.

According to Carl R. Stevenson, Interim Chair of the IEEE 802.18
Regulatory Technical Advisory Group, Sirius has
withdrawn its FCC petition regarding out of band (OOB) emissions from
2.4GHz users.

Sifry’s Alerts’ comments on this development:

This is good – it removes a potential issue that overshadowed the
widespread adoption of wireless technologies like 802.11b. I think the
FCC would have ruled against them anyway, for the following reasons:

1. They were asking for a legislative fix to the laws of physics. This
Sirius request included an OOB limit of -158dbm which is 8 dbm below the
thermal noise floor. In other words, the normal evaporation of water
into clouds makes more noise in the 2.5GHz spectrum. Besides, other
noise generators much closer to the receiver emit a much larger noise
profile. The spark emitted from a spark plug is one example.

2. Significant opposition from other established industry players,
including Motorola, Intersil, Intel, and others.

3. The FCC’s emphasis on reducing the digital divide. The FCC was being
asked to decide if it was more important to have high-end radio between
cities or cheap, high bandwidth connectivity in low income
neighborhoods, and I think the public interest would have won on this
one.

So, count one for the good guys today! And don’t rub Sirius’ nose in it
- they did the right thing.