June 6, 2002

Sirius has withdrawn their FCC petition!

According to Carl R. Stevenson, Interim Chair of the IEEE 802.18 Regulatory Technical Advisory Group, Sirius has withdrawn its FCC petition regarding out of band (OOB) emissions from 2.4GHz users.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. Posted by dsifry at June 6, 2002 8:41 AM | View blog reactions

Comments

attempts to legislate science are great. if only the movement to define pi as 3 had got off the ground!

Posted by: aaron brick at June 6, 2002 4:16 PM

well, govt does have a history of legislating science.
Eg, it was long ago that congress actually legislated that
the tomato was a vegetable!

Some producers i believe, in order to escape a particular tax on vegetables had presented the outrageous case that the tomatoe, being a fruit biologiclly, could not be
taxed. The US Congress, in its wisdom, therefore passed
a law that defined the tomatoe, contrary to all biological data, as a vegetable, and therefore taxable.

and the debate has raged on , eversince.

Posted by: tkjtkj at June 6, 2002 6:41 PM

Does anyone have any independent confirmation of this? I didn't see anything about Sirius dropping their petition on the FCC site.

Posted by: Erik at June 10, 2002 11:00 AM