Australia's communications regulator, ACMA, has already permitted Wi-Fi 6E devices to operate in the lower 6 GHz band (5925–6425 MHz) under the Low Interference Potential Devices (LIPD) Class Licence. This includes low-power indoor (LPI) and very low power (VLP) devices.
As for the upper 6 GHz band (6425–7125 MHz), ACMA is still evaluating its use. In June 2024, it sought public input on possible applications, including RLANs and wide-area wireless broadband services.
So, while unlicensed device operations are allowed in the lower 6 GHz band, the upper band is still under consideration.
AM radio, FM radio, amateur radio, and television broadcast have quite a lot of spectrum real estate. Are they being used enough to justify this allocation?
Is the gain in bandwidth for your wifi really worth the reallocation?
This change opens up 1200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz.
> quite a lot of spectrum real estate
Amateur radio is scattered all over the place, but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz... ignoring the fact that they are tiny slices, the upper limit of bandwidth you can hope to gain under that frequency is 300 MHz (for all of it), and considering that most of that is not amateur radio, you are going to be gaining a negligible amount of bandwidth that cannot be practically used for a single application because it is not contiguous.
The higher the frequency the more bandwidth is available. For high throughput applications reclaiming these relatively low frequency bands is not useful.
> but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz...
The 70cm band (420-450MHz US) is heavily used. I'm sure cellular services would love it. On the other hand, it is a secondary allocation with other users (e.g. military radars) having priority.
The 23cm band is another secondary allocation, from 1240MHz to 1300MHz-- wide enough for 3 wifi channels. On the other hand, you'd have to kick out the radiolocation service, and it's not contiguous with a big block of channels to make it worthwhile.
Then above that amateur shares frequencies with some of wifi and then microwave frequencies that are so high that they are undesirable.
Lower frequency means longer wavelength and longer wavelength penetrates structures better. Or is that over simplified? I’d think the goal of reclaiming some of the lower frequency spectrum is not to try and solve bandwidth issues but to augment consumer wifi with more connectivity options for devices and applications where connection reliability is more important than max throughput.
Speaking only to spectrum allocation for amateur radio, that service is a critical resource in emergencies, like Hurricane Helene.
The small amateur radio spectrum allocations cover long-wave emissions that can communicate around the planet and short-wave emissions that engage local repeater networks.
Think of it as an insurance policy - communications backup when comm is a life & death matter. Doesn't happen often, but really important when it's needed.
Good point. With that, with Starlink and soon Starlink direct to cell, this capability is becoming much less important in an emergency. Starlink already provides Internet and soon everyone will have satellite capable phone (I assume texting will be prioritized in emergency for bandwidth).
Some of that is because those frequencies have special characteristics, e.g., extreme long range propagation. Would you like to have a wifi router that gets interference from 300 km away or requires a certain geomagnetic storm to connect to your ISP?
Actually they don't consume a very large portion of the overall spectrum at all. Nearly all the bands you mention are in the Mhz range or less rather than Ghz and as a result they're not really even suited for WiFi use. The lower frequencies are less optimal for high speed data transfer and also broadcast to a longer range, as well as penetrate buildings more easily than their higher frequency counterparts.
As well as that those bands are already heavily used already - it would make no sense to open these bands up to WiFi.
I am not sure what we would do with the AM band. If it were me, I would very strongly convince half the stations to go dark. Allow the remaining ones to broadcast 10khz, which for some radios and their lucky owners would be a nice, attractive, more compelling signal. Loosen up regulations a bit and see what happens.
Disasters warrant keeping the band for basic news and reporting if nothing else.
FM already has improved audio. Perhaps the same looser regs would bring more people in.
Television in particular seems ripe to be reallocated. Didn't we go through a whole analog-to-digital conversion over a decade ago that led to TV going through wires instead of through the air?
In nearly all populated areas of the US, you can still receive broadcast TV for free over the air with an antenna.
Digital television stations state what "channel" they are in their signal's meta data. That allows them to change frequencies but keep their channel identity. Since TV when digital, many stations have changed frequencies, some several times. You may find the "repacking" of the broadcast TV frequencies an interesting read:
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it would cost me quite a lot of money to view my local free-to-air TV stations over either cable or the Internet, so antenna it is (for the very few times I need it).
I wonder if this is going to be the distraction to suggested changes in 900MHz.
My other guess is the major uses of this will turn out to be UWB related:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband
Which in practice is largely about short range location finding.
I too have been watching the 900 MHz stuff as I have a number of unlicensed long range devices (1W ERP) that work in that range. The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communications. I don't subscribe to that opinion, I expect however that there is pressure from commercial interests on UHF and VHF frequencies.
I also believe you are correct in that the bulk of the use of the 6 GHz band will be UWB related and folks will exploit the multi-GSPS ADCs and DACs that are on Xilinx's RFSOC and Analog Devices is shipping. I read a pitch for a UWB "HD video extender" which was basically connecting a 4K display over UWB to a source rather than via a cable. That idea became a lot more viable with the current FCC order.
>The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communication
Whether or not people are paranoid, if the FCC moves all unlicenced frequencies into the GHz range, they limit the public's ability to communicate over long ranges with unlicensed equipment.
Easy calculated move; try explaining that shrinking of freedom to today's layperson. There are shades of this in understanding when and why to use VPNs and distributed filesharing (e.g. torrents as part of long-term archival efforts), versus easy smear campaign by those wishing to suppress it.
> The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communications.
I am so paranoid I think that if the FCC are doing this they are right to, or may at least have a point.
We need to accept the radio spectrum is part of the cyber security profile of the area of the country.
To drop a giant hint, something that listens to one thing in remote areas, transmits the results via another channel, over a series of hops and then out of the country, would be of great interest to some people.
The restrictions are annoying, but my belief is the FCC (and international equivalents) should promote amateur radio licensing by committing to protecting licensed usage in the existing amateur bands, and get more HAMs inside the tent pissing in the outward direction.
> something that listens to one thing in remote areas, transmits the results via another channel, over a series of hops and then out of the country, would be of great interest to some people.
The oldest operating satellite (older than the Voyagers) appeared to fail to due a battery issue, but somehow woke up in a mostly-working state soon after. It was noticed by activitsts in Poland, and was used to bounce radio messages out of the country. Since satellite communication is pretty directional, and into the sky, it was difficult-to-impossible to triangulate the source of the signals.
Selling the amateur/LoRaWAN spectrum to a private company for more cellular bandwidth. And, ostensibly, a terrestrial GPS backup that operates concurrently with those cellular functions, but that's a red herring in my opinion, it's basically a land-grab of public unlicensed frequencies to lease out to Verizon/ATT/Tmobile.
A current proposal regarding the 900MHz band, primarily put forward by NextNav, suggests a significant reorganization of the spectrum to allocate a portion for their terrestrial 3D positioning network, potentially creating dedicated uplink and downlink bands within the lower 900MHz range, which could impact existing users like toll systems and RFID devices due to potential interference concerns; however, this proposal faces strong opposition from various industries currently utilizing the band
From what i heard from knowledgeable people, not just that but also unspoofable range - when verifiable proximity/direction is desirable eg for security applications. Say you want a car that opens only when your phone is within ~2m range, and not from 1km away with some MITM/amplification device.
Not sure this is used already but it was one of the benefits mentioned to me.
You're referring to that NextNav BS? Utterly insane. I am furtunate enough to have an employer who actually cares, so we wrote a comment together about it.
It's an affront to reason. Yeah, let's nuke a massive chunk of amateur spectrum, AND LoraWAN AND Z-wave AND EZPass so that domestic orgs can have a pre-enshittified PNT implementation. Never mind that demand for PNT is driven primarily by orgs operating on foreign soil, where nobody gives a damn what the FCC thinks.
14 dBm EIRP = 25 milliwatts, typical legal max for wifi, and the -5 dBm/MHz EIRP power spectral density says that 25 mW must be spread over an 80 MHz channel.
To quote that PDF as it was a bit hard to find within the many dozens of pages:
Pg. 95: Very Low Power Device. For the purpose of this subpart, a device that operates in the 5.925-6.425 GHz and 6.525-6.875 GHz bands and has an integrated antenna. These devices do not need to operate under the control of an access point.
Pg. 98: Geofenced Very Low Power Access Point. For the purpose of this subpart, an access point that operates in the 5.925–7.125 GHz band, has an integrated antenna, and uses a geofencing system to determine channel availability at its location.
> The Commission envisioned that body-worn devices would make-up
most VLP device use cases and that these devices would provide large quantities of data in real-time. Entities that support the Commission permitting VLP device operation expect that these devices will support portable use cases, such as wearable peripherals (e.g., smartphones, glasses, watches, and earphones), including augmented reality/virtual reality and other personal-area-network applications, as well as in-vehicle applications (e.g., dashboard displays).
There already is underutilized spectrum for V2V, Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC), in the 5.9 GHz band -- the lower 45 MHz(5.850-5.895 GHz) for unlicensed uses, such as Wi-Fi, and the upper 30 MHz (5.895-5.925 GHz) for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.
In November 2024, the FCC finalized rules of the 5.850-5.925 GHz band, including for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, which is considered a successor to DSRC for V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.
V2V had spectrum allocated to it since 1999. But V2V+V2I got sucked into C-V2X which is astounding to me; on the one hand it make sense (5G is good at this sort of thing), but now you have gatekeepers taking their cut to provide the Service. It it were straight V2V, then it would have been free-to-use. It is astounding to me that in 2024, we still do not have the vehicle in front of you sending to your car's computers data that the driver ahead just hit his/her brakes, and you should be prepared to do the same. AEB is fine, but the current attitude seems to be "Battleship My Car" - meaning, collect all the data, make all the decisions in MY car, other cars be damned...or, ignored.
My guess is V2V just presented too many security holes to win widespread adoption. If you could go around spoofing braking events on the highway, that would be super dangerous. But that's just my guess.
As to talking with cars around you, get a ham radio license, and set your HT to 146.52 MHz -- the national simplex calling frequency. The more people we have monitoring 146.52, the better. That frequency, more than any other ham radio frequency, is the nationwide "SOS!" channel. If you have an emergency out of cellphone range, but you have an HT, often 'somebody' will hear you on 146.52 and can call for help. The other common calling frequency is 446.000 but 2 meters tends to have better range through forest terrain; and probably more people listen to "52" than 446.000 --- but try both in an emergency.
I feel like limits on EIRP are overly conservative and restrict the usefulness of phased arrays. If the limit were on total radiated power, then your 1 watt WiFi router could have the range of a kilowatt transceiver with a reasonable number of antenna elements, while emitting the same total power as interference. But since the limit is on EIRP, the phased array is limited to the same range, and so there's no point in using a phased array over a single antenna.
Does anyone know if there's a good reason to use EIRP that I'm missing? I figure satellite communication terminals can have huge EIRPs because they're all pointed at the sky, but the FCC can't guarantee that the beams won't cross for other bands, so they limit the EIRP, but I still think we would all be better off of our systems were spatially selective.
If you use a directive antenna to concentrate the radiated power into a small solid angle, to reach a distant receiver, you also increase in the same proportion the interference for another receiver that is located in the same direction as yours, but which does not want to receive your signal.
So limiting EIRP provides a limit for the interference suffered by a receiver that happens to be in the direction towards which you transmit, for which it does not matter at all which is the total power that you transmit in all directions.
True, but it dissuades folks from using directional signals, broadcasting RF energy in more directions and increasing the noise floor for everyone. I feel like there should be some sort of middle point here.
EIRP is good at reducing uintentional interference. After all, you'd probably wouldn't like me pointing a 20 element yagi antenna through your house, denying your ability to use the spectrum in a reasonable manner, just so I could do a point-to-point fixed link.
EIRP minimizes regulations. It's a good trade-off over operator and installation licencing.
Yes, for the same reason that I can look into a 5mW LED but 5mW of laser can blind me. Your neighbour's WiFi routewr might be entirely DoS'd by the Maser of RF coming through the wall at it from your phased array, even thoughh it's only 100mW.
Sure, but the probability would be low-ish of that happening, and the other system could either switch frequencies or beamform a null in the direction of the interferer if they were also a phased array.
Maybe the EIRP shouldn't be unlimited, but I still think it would be beneficial to encourage spatially selective systems.
This (and the parent) really sound super interesting to me, but I don't understand. Before I spend hours on Wikipedia reading about EIRP and phased array (and probably give up), is there a chance one of you could explain this briefly in words I may understand? :)
Modern MIMO is about utilizing the combined channel efficiently, not necessarily beam forming. In most cases you can still extract more capacity from a channel with two or more antennas within the same EIRP envelope as a single antenna.
I feel like the barrier may be whether dedicated hardware is required or not. In such a large band, 6 GHz, I would expect a lot of generalized (i.e. non-dedicated) platform hardware to be developed & offered allowing software-focused innovators to offer into the long tail of applications, including mesh network(s).
Everyone I've talked to from the LORA crowd and even some (LORA) alliance guys tells me lo-energy meshes are hard to get right. Am I missing something?
I wonder if ESP-NOW[0] would be useful for this. I've been toying with building some mesh-based lighting controllers for synchronizing lights. Fortunately it can be entirely static (number of nodes) which makes it an easier problem than dynamic meshes.
Correct. Source: I do low-energy mesh networks. There are loads of tradeoffs, and a lot of it just has to do with the physical medium.
Sure, you could go with an off-the-shelf solution, but those aren't always a good fit for whatever product you're developing. If you can squeeze your bandwidth requirements to an absolute minimum, say, tens of kilobits, you can accomplish absolutely nutty stuff with a cheap LoRa radio and a well-designed antenna. Sure, it's tens of kilobits, but it's tens of kilobits sent and received over a mile between devices with batteries the size of your pinky.
Mesh networks are a neat idea, but the reality of is often disappointing e.g. given compatible radios all the IoT devices in a room could form a mesh network of equal peers, but if a few lightbulbs use their position (mains powered, good location) to form a hierarchical network it will actually work (without wasting battery power and air time).
This feels very pie in the sky and dreamlike. Of course some corp will figure out something to do within this space and make closed products that push out free and open uses. At least that's my pessimistic view opposed to your optimism.
If you pop open a spectrum analyzer in most places, you'll see a ghost town in the Cathedral and a hopping lively Bazaar in 2.4/5GHz. On net, it is good that more resources are going to the Bazaar.
6ghz is pretty fragile -- i can't imagine one product "pushing out" another when a wall will block the signal. Just don't have the closed products in your home, and the open ones should work just fine...
The alleged/misunderstood "fragility" can be exploited though. A lot of residential walls are gypsum board, which contains a lot of water, and attenuates microwave signals.
Rather than fight this by trying to shout as loud as you can from a single AP across the house, you can put smaller, weaker APs in multiple rooms. Because of the excellent open air penetration and high frequency, you can get a multi-gig links with no interference or competition.
Looks like it does not allow new channels for 6 GHz Wi-Fi. 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) already covers full range of FCC's allowed frequency range. IEEE committee may add new channels in 802.11bn (expected to be ratified around 2028, and commercial name will be Wi-Fi 8) but it also looks like a low probably, considering both 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6/ Wi-Fi 6e) and 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) mostly focuses on reducing the interference between different networks by reducing the collision, instead of widening the spectrum (BSS coloring, Flexible Channel Utilization etc.)
1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz.
Very Low Power: 25 mW (14 dBm) power.. with -5 dBm/MHz PSD, indoor and outdoor usage.
Think of short range use-cases like smartphone to laptop or smartphone to earbuds/ARVR.
2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz
Low Power Indoor: 1W (30 dBm) power with 5 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); only indoor usage.
Think of your home router.
3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK
Standard Power: 4W (36 dBm) power with 23 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); indoor or outdoor usage.
Requires Aautomated Frequency Coordination; send your location to cloud, cloud tell you which channels area available.
Think of enterprise or high power routers; outdoor point to point links (WISP)
So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).
6GHz has 3 modes of operation:'
1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz.
Very Low Power: 25 mW (14 dBm) power.. with -5 dBm/MHz PSD, indoor and outdoor usage.
Think of short range use-cases like smartphone to laptop or smartphone to earbuds/ARVR.
2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz
Low Power Indoor: 1W (30 dBm) power with 5 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); only indoor usage.
Think of your home router.
3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK
Standard Power: 4W (36 dBm) power with 23 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); indoor or outdoor usage.
Requires Aautomated Frequency Coordination; send your location to cloud, cloud tell you which channels area available.
Think of enterprise or high power routers; outdoor point to point links (WISP)
So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).
This will allow better channel availability (low latency, higher throughput) for mobile applications in very dense areas..
Devices can now use all 1,200 MHz of the 6 GHz band, which was previously restricted. This move supports newer tech standards like Wi-Fi 6E and sets the stage for Wi-Fi 7.
> It is a holiday miracle for small low power handheld devices.
Is it really? Isn't the signal blocked if a person simply walks between he devices? i.e. if you are wearing a receiver and just turn around you will lose connection.
It's line of sight only. Think about it like a flashlight. If you have a flashlight (w/power) up on top of a skyscraper roof or a mountainside it can be seen at very long distances. At street level it goes till the next small rise in the ground.
Range for the newly-available parts of the 6 GHz band will not be substantially different from range for the 5 GHz band and the portions of the 6 GHz band that were already available for uses like WiFi.
I hope other jurisdictions follow suit so hardware using it can be cheaper due to economies of scale. The segmentation of LoRA radios between US/EU is already pretty annoying and they're fairly niche.
Satellite communications, point-to-point microwave systems, and other similar things (high-data-rate, point-to-point communication) all operate near this band. However, there's plenty of spectrum and the use cases may be declining. There were also some radar systems in this band, but IIRC the useful new radar systems are higher-frequency (10's of GHz for resolution) or lower-frequency (10's-100's of MHz to have longer range).
1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz.
Very Low Power: 25 mW (14 dBm) power.. with -5 dBm/MHz PSD, indoor and outdoor usage.
Think of short range use-cases like smartphone to laptop or smartphone to earbuds/ARVR.
2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz
Low Power Indoor: 1W (30 dBm) power with 5 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); only indoor usage.
Think of your home router.
3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK
Standard Power: 4W (36 dBm) power with 23 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); indoor or outdoor usage.
Requires Aautomated Frequency Coordination; send your location to cloud, cloud tell you which channels area available.
Think of enterprise or high power routers; outdoor point to point links (WISP)
So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).
I wonder if this was in motion for a while and then intentionally accelerated to ensure it happens under Biden.
Optically it's a pretty pure win. Open stuff sounds good. Less regs sounds good. Tech sounds good. And it's not something that has a corresponding voting block opposing. Just pure upside politically.
Is there any merit to non-ionizing frequencies having harmful impacts on human biological function, I thought so, but is it all "conspiracy" and laughed out of the room or a legitimate scientific part of these discussions?
I'm not a physicist or biologist but what's always made sense to me is that anytime you walk outside during the day you are bathed in broad spectrum radiation from the sun. So anything weaker than the sun is probably safe enough. Anything a million or billion times weaker is probably a million or billion times safer. We already know when and how radios get dangerous (large transmission towers, microwave ovens, etc) and how to mitigate that danger. Inverse cube law and somesuch.
The sun is damaging because it contains ionizing radiation (radiation that is powerful enough to directly disassociate a molecule into ions). This is the UV portion of sunlight.
UV starts at 800,000 GHz.
The 6Ghz being discussed here is completely non-ionizing, not even comparable to UV.
The only concern with 6Ghz is that is can also cause dielectric heating, which is the same as a microwave. But again, at 25mW, you can't even feel the heat from direct contact with the antenna, let alone a few meters away. Your exposure follows the inverse-square law [1], which means that it drops proportional to the square of the distance. So if it's not a problem at 10cm, it's 100x less of a non-problem at 1m.
evolutionary argument is humans are aligned with broad spectrum radiation from the sun, but not the artificial forms which have different magnitudes in different frequencies.
Eg: you are much less likely to get sunburn if you get plenty of natural (or artificial) infrared.
Microwave frequencies can harm biological function through heating tissue; in particular eyeballs have lots of water and poor ability to dissipate heat. However, very low power densities are almost certainly safe.
[edit]
Another example of non-ionizing radiation harming human tissue would be if you stick your hand in front of a cutting laser. Maybe obvious, but you asked...
Most concerns focus around the electromagnetic radiation heating your tissue. Microwave ovens operate at 2.4MHz, and most common frequencies can work like a microwave with varying efficiency. At the intensities of normal transmissions that isn't really a concern. For a time this seemed like something we might worry about with phones, since during a phone call there we have an active antenna right next to your fairly sensitive brain that might not like being heated up. But even there it turned out that the effect was too small to be of concern
Ham radio operators do need to worry about radio exposure safety for heating. But we are using much higher powers, 100W is normal HF radio, and 1500W is the limit. 5W handheld next to head is safe. Also, the
There’s none other than localized heating effects, and yes, it’s laughed out of the room.
So, obviously you don’t want to microwave your eyeballs, but you’d feel that in other nearby tissues as heat. If you don’t feel heat from a non-ionizing RF source, you’re not getting cooked. In any case, the amount of infrared coming off an incandescent lightbulb is about 3 orders of magnitude higher than the energy coming off a WiFi router antenna. If being in the room with a lightbulb is safe, so is being in the room with WiFi.
There isn’t a set of rules of physics where low-power, non-heating, non-ionizing RF is dangerous, and also where CPUs work. They’re incompatible. You can’t have both of those at the same time.
> There isn’t a set of rules of physics where low-power, non-heating, non-ionizing RF is dangerous, and also where CPUs work. They’re incompatible. You can’t have both of those at the same time.
Please elaborate on this? But it sounds like you're overgeneralizing. There's a lot of ways non-ionizing RF could potentially be "dangerous" to some kind of biological tissue, we just haven't found those ways in humans.
For one category of mechanism, there's plenty of proteins that absorb certain wavelengths and activate cellular pathways based on the amount they receive.
We honestly don’t know. Current safety standards mostly focus on preventing tissue heating, because that’s the one effect we can reliably measure and understand. But there’s a chunk of exploratory research out there looking at potential “non-thermal” effects—things like subtle shifts in cell signaling, membrane permeability, or oxidative stress—that might not show up as a measurable temperature increase.
So far, the studies that have been well-designed and replicated haven’t consistently nailed down a clear causal link between non-thermal EMF exposure (within the limits that regulators consider safe) and actual health problems. Still, some researchers argue that we’re not accounting for all the slow-burn, cumulative effects that might be happening. It’s not easy to tease out these subtle influences from the noise of environmental variables, and that makes it hard to really say we’ve got a handle on the whole picture. Check out Prof Michael Levin's Bioelectricity work if you want to go down a very interesting rabbit hole about what we're only recently discovering about how our biology might really work and how electricity and emf's shape it.
With a large enough antenna and enough power you can cook your neighbor.
The ham radio licensing procedure in the US mostly focuses on this effect. Even though there's nothing conclusive I'd imagine there are other deleterious effects that aren't trivially measurable. If it can heat it up it can do other stuff too. Cooking your brain by standing too close to a high power transmission tower can't be good.
I'm an amateur extra, I would challenge any "scientist" laughing EMF dangers off to go find the nearest AM radio tower and spend 6 months in the transmission room for "science".
Without sarcasm, the studies I have found over the years ruled out cumulative effects (unlike ionizing radiation). They so far haven't been able to rule out various types of cancer, ALS, or other diseases caused by long-term exposure.
I also have an extra license. AM transmits up in the ballpark of 50,000W. Anything at 50,000W with toast you like a marshmallow. That has nothing to do with RF, but with the sheer amounts of power pumping through it.
I am plausibly a "scientist" who has done "science", and I'm not standing next to a AM radio tower for precisely the same reason I wouldn't stand next to a 50,000W light bulb, EMF be darned.
It's not on studies to rule out all the things you mention. The job of studies is to demonstrate that EMF does cause any of them. "EMF is safe" is falsifiable: if you can find one counterexample, it's untrue. And yet, after all the years we've been working with it, other than people who get cooked from sheer power levels, we don't have any proof that it causes those (or any) diseases.
Yes, there is evidence, but as usually you will get downvoted to oblivion before you can get the point across.
One of the things being pointed to are these EMFs effecting ion channels. The TRPV1 receptor is one of these channels. The TRPV1 receptor is a heat receptor but has many functions. Since this receptor is in the skin 5G and 6G can effect it. The receptor pumps calcium into the cell, and any neurologist will tell you what that can do.
Seems like that will also limit the uses for outdoor IoT applications, like wireless sensing in farm fields or wireless management of solar panels or industrial applications. Outdoor mobile applications seem to be allowed, but that may be of limited use if there is nothing outside to talk to. Maybe using robots or mobile platforms to create a mobile network with wide continuous coverage would be a work-around? For example vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
This is cool, I hope Australia follows suit!
Australia's communications regulator, ACMA, has already permitted Wi-Fi 6E devices to operate in the lower 6 GHz band (5925–6425 MHz) under the Low Interference Potential Devices (LIPD) Class Licence. This includes low-power indoor (LPI) and very low power (VLP) devices.
As for the upper 6 GHz band (6425–7125 MHz), ACMA is still evaluating its use. In June 2024, it sought public input on possible applications, including RLANs and wide-area wireless broadband services.
So, while unlicensed device operations are allowed in the lower 6 GHz band, the upper band is still under consideration.
Chart of all US frequency allocations (as of 2016, but there doesn't appear to be a more up to date one?): https://www.ntia.gov/sites/default/files/publications/januar...
The most current document is here, but it's text.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/fcctable.pdf
> The most current document is here, but it's text.
"but" ???
Not everyone has the same use case.
I get what you mean, but look at it. It's horrible.
As opposed to a chart.
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AM radio, FM radio, amateur radio, and television broadcast have quite a lot of spectrum real estate. Are they being used enough to justify this allocation?
Is the gain in bandwidth for your wifi really worth the reallocation?
This change opens up 1200 MHz of bandwidth between 5.925 and 7.125 GHz.
> quite a lot of spectrum real estate
Amateur radio is scattered all over the place, but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz... ignoring the fact that they are tiny slices, the upper limit of bandwidth you can hope to gain under that frequency is 300 MHz (for all of it), and considering that most of that is not amateur radio, you are going to be gaining a negligible amount of bandwidth that cannot be practically used for a single application because it is not contiguous.
The higher the frequency the more bandwidth is available. For high throughput applications reclaiming these relatively low frequency bands is not useful.
> but excluding radio satellite they are mostly bellow 300 MHz...
The 70cm band (420-450MHz US) is heavily used. I'm sure cellular services would love it. On the other hand, it is a secondary allocation with other users (e.g. military radars) having priority.
The 23cm band is another secondary allocation, from 1240MHz to 1300MHz-- wide enough for 3 wifi channels. On the other hand, you'd have to kick out the radiolocation service, and it's not contiguous with a big block of channels to make it worthwhile.
Then above that amateur shares frequencies with some of wifi and then microwave frequencies that are so high that they are undesirable.
Lower frequency means longer wavelength and longer wavelength penetrates structures better. Or is that over simplified? I’d think the goal of reclaiming some of the lower frequency spectrum is not to try and solve bandwidth issues but to augment consumer wifi with more connectivity options for devices and applications where connection reliability is more important than max throughput.
AM radio really doesn't occupy a lot of bandwidth, nor does FM.
The chart is logarithmically stacked, i.e. each row would fit into the one below 10 times, 100 times two rows down etc.
It does, because 100-200 kHz and 6.1-6.2 MHz are not the same. Lower frequencies are generally more valuable.
Speaking only to spectrum allocation for amateur radio, that service is a critical resource in emergencies, like Hurricane Helene.
The small amateur radio spectrum allocations cover long-wave emissions that can communicate around the planet and short-wave emissions that engage local repeater networks.
Think of it as an insurance policy - communications backup when comm is a life & death matter. Doesn't happen often, but really important when it's needed.
Here[0] is some more info about amateur emergency services in the US
[0]: https://www.arrl.org/amateur-radio-emergency-communication
Good point. With that, with Starlink and soon Starlink direct to cell, this capability is becoming much less important in an emergency. Starlink already provides Internet and soon everyone will have satellite capable phone (I assume texting will be prioritized in emergency for bandwidth).
Some of that is because those frequencies have special characteristics, e.g., extreme long range propagation. Would you like to have a wifi router that gets interference from 300 km away or requires a certain geomagnetic storm to connect to your ISP?
Spectrum is shown as a log scale for convenience but in reality it's linear so all those combined are less than the the 6ghz band
Actually they don't consume a very large portion of the overall spectrum at all. Nearly all the bands you mention are in the Mhz range or less rather than Ghz and as a result they're not really even suited for WiFi use. The lower frequencies are less optimal for high speed data transfer and also broadcast to a longer range, as well as penetrate buildings more easily than their higher frequency counterparts.
As well as that those bands are already heavily used already - it would make no sense to open these bands up to WiFi.
Each level on the chart has 10x the bandwidth of the level above it. It's not really that much spectrum.
No, AM radio are low RF frequency and have little spectrum for data transmission. also due to long range it will be severely interference limited.
I am not sure what we would do with the AM band. If it were me, I would very strongly convince half the stations to go dark. Allow the remaining ones to broadcast 10khz, which for some radios and their lucky owners would be a nice, attractive, more compelling signal. Loosen up regulations a bit and see what happens.
Disasters warrant keeping the band for basic news and reporting if nothing else.
FM already has improved audio. Perhaps the same looser regs would bring more people in.
Whom that listened AM are not listening AM for the sake of audio quality, but for catching remote broadcasting station or pirates.
Television in particular seems ripe to be reallocated. Didn't we go through a whole analog-to-digital conversion over a decade ago that led to TV going through wires instead of through the air?
Much of the TV spectrum has already been reallocated.
Channels 70 to 83 to 1G cellular in 1983.
Channels 52 to 69 to 4G cellular in 2008.
Channels 38 to 51 to 4G/5G cellular in 2017.
The current allocation is channels 2 through 36. Channel 37 is not used.
In nearly all populated areas of the US, you can still receive broadcast TV for free over the air with an antenna.
Digital television stations state what "channel" they are in their signal's meta data. That allows them to change frequencies but keep their channel identity. Since TV when digital, many stations have changed frequencies, some several times. You may find the "repacking" of the broadcast TV frequencies an interesting read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_United_States_wireless_sp...
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, it would cost me quite a lot of money to view my local free-to-air TV stations over either cable or the Internet, so antenna it is (for the very few times I need it).
Analog-vs-digital is entirely orthogonal to wires-vs-air. You can send either signal over either medium.
Broadcast TV still goes over the air, though it's digital now.
The digital signals are still radio-carried, but yes, that would technically allow condensing the spectrum some.
No, the analog tv sunsetting was just about the tx format. You can still broadcast digital signals OTA.
I feel a lot of the bandwidth for broadcast television is wasted on channels no one is watching.
I wonder if this is going to be the distraction to suggested changes in 900MHz.
My other guess is the major uses of this will turn out to be UWB related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband Which in practice is largely about short range location finding.
I too have been watching the 900 MHz stuff as I have a number of unlicensed long range devices (1W ERP) that work in that range. The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communications. I don't subscribe to that opinion, I expect however that there is pressure from commercial interests on UHF and VHF frequencies.
I also believe you are correct in that the bulk of the use of the 6 GHz band will be UWB related and folks will exploit the multi-GSPS ADCs and DACs that are on Xilinx's RFSOC and Analog Devices is shipping. I read a pitch for a UWB "HD video extender" which was basically connecting a 4K display over UWB to a source rather than via a cable. That idea became a lot more viable with the current FCC order.
>The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communication
Whether or not people are paranoid, if the FCC moves all unlicenced frequencies into the GHz range, they limit the public's ability to communicate over long ranges with unlicensed equipment.
Easy calculated move; try explaining that shrinking of freedom to today's layperson. There are shades of this in understanding when and why to use VPNs and distributed filesharing (e.g. torrents as part of long-term archival efforts), versus easy smear campaign by those wishing to suppress it.
Long ranges mean lots of devices you could inadvertantly step on. Licensing is part of how they stop this.
Unless the public devises ways to use sub-ghz frequencies without getting caught.
> The paranoid folks believe the FCC is trying to move all of the unlicensed stuff into the GHz+ range to limit long range communications.
I am so paranoid I think that if the FCC are doing this they are right to, or may at least have a point.
We need to accept the radio spectrum is part of the cyber security profile of the area of the country.
To drop a giant hint, something that listens to one thing in remote areas, transmits the results via another channel, over a series of hops and then out of the country, would be of great interest to some people.
The restrictions are annoying, but my belief is the FCC (and international equivalents) should promote amateur radio licensing by committing to protecting licensed usage in the existing amateur bands, and get more HAMs inside the tent pissing in the outward direction.
That ship sailed long ago. there are tons of satellites that make that completely impossible to control.
> something that listens to one thing in remote areas, transmits the results via another channel, over a series of hops and then out of the country, would be of great interest to some people.
Is preventing this even possible in todays world?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMSAT-OSCAR_7#Use_by_Polish_an...
The oldest operating satellite (older than the Voyagers) appeared to fail to due a battery issue, but somehow woke up in a mostly-working state soon after. It was noticed by activitsts in Poland, and was used to bounce radio messages out of the country. Since satellite communication is pretty directional, and into the sky, it was difficult-to-impossible to triangulate the source of the signals.
What are the suggested changes?
Selling the amateur/LoRaWAN spectrum to a private company for more cellular bandwidth. And, ostensibly, a terrestrial GPS backup that operates concurrently with those cellular functions, but that's a red herring in my opinion, it's basically a land-grab of public unlicensed frequencies to lease out to Verizon/ATT/Tmobile.
I found this:
A current proposal regarding the 900MHz band, primarily put forward by NextNav, suggests a significant reorganization of the spectrum to allocate a portion for their terrestrial 3D positioning network, potentially creating dedicated uplink and downlink bands within the lower 900MHz range, which could impact existing users like toll systems and RFID devices due to potential interference concerns; however, this proposal faces strong opposition from various industries currently utilizing the band
I work with some of that RFID/Tolling equipment and I can tell you this would be very bad news for a lot of industries.
> short range location finding
From what i heard from knowledgeable people, not just that but also unspoofable range - when verifiable proximity/direction is desirable eg for security applications. Say you want a car that opens only when your phone is within ~2m range, and not from 1km away with some MITM/amplification device.
Not sure this is used already but it was one of the benefits mentioned to me.
Speed of light. If you require a really fast response it's physically impossible to amplify from far away.
You're referring to that NextNav BS? Utterly insane. I am furtunate enough to have an employer who actually cares, so we wrote a comment together about it.
It's an affront to reason. Yeah, let's nuke a massive chunk of amateur spectrum, AND LoraWAN AND Z-wave AND EZPass so that domestic orgs can have a pre-enshittified PNT implementation. Never mind that demand for PNT is driven primarily by orgs operating on foreign soil, where nobody gives a damn what the FCC thinks.
Though they have rather more final ways of silencing unauthorized transmitters.
I'm sure looking forward to all the new and exciting ways we'll be surveilled and our private lives intruded on.
But will UWB be allowed to have a higher EIRP in this band?
The news release doesn't say what qualifies as very low power. There's a definition at https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-397315A1.pdf.
14 dBm EIRP = 25 milliwatts, typical legal max for wifi, and the -5 dBm/MHz EIRP power spectral density says that 25 mW must be spread over an 80 MHz channel.
> 25 milliwatts, typical legal max for wifi
AFAIK wifi can use more power than that, at least in the US: 100mW, possibly 200mW, not sure what the hard limit is (or how much that must be spread).
To quote that PDF as it was a bit hard to find within the many dozens of pages:
Pg. 95: Very Low Power Device. For the purpose of this subpart, a device that operates in the 5.925-6.425 GHz and 6.525-6.875 GHz bands and has an integrated antenna. These devices do not need to operate under the control of an access point.
Pg. 98: Geofenced Very Low Power Access Point. For the purpose of this subpart, an access point that operates in the 5.925–7.125 GHz band, has an integrated antenna, and uses a geofencing system to determine channel availability at its location.
Sooo no watts or meters?
> The Commission envisioned that body-worn devices would make-up most VLP device use cases and that these devices would provide large quantities of data in real-time. Entities that support the Commission permitting VLP device operation expect that these devices will support portable use cases, such as wearable peripherals (e.g., smartphones, glasses, watches, and earphones), including augmented reality/virtual reality and other personal-area-network applications, as well as in-vehicle applications (e.g., dashboard displays).
i was expecting vehicle-to-vehicle communications
You could just put your mobile number on your back window to encourage conversations.
I like the idea of an LED marquee board with a little speech-to-text thingy inside the cabin.
Getting a burner number is expensive though
There already is underutilized spectrum for V2V, Dedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC), in the 5.9 GHz band -- the lower 45 MHz(5.850-5.895 GHz) for unlicensed uses, such as Wi-Fi, and the upper 30 MHz (5.895-5.925 GHz) for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications, including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications.
In November 2024, the FCC finalized rules of the 5.850-5.925 GHz band, including for Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) technology, which is considered a successor to DSRC for V2V and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications.
V2V had spectrum allocated to it since 1999. But V2V+V2I got sucked into C-V2X which is astounding to me; on the one hand it make sense (5G is good at this sort of thing), but now you have gatekeepers taking their cut to provide the Service. It it were straight V2V, then it would have been free-to-use. It is astounding to me that in 2024, we still do not have the vehicle in front of you sending to your car's computers data that the driver ahead just hit his/her brakes, and you should be prepared to do the same. AEB is fine, but the current attitude seems to be "Battleship My Car" - meaning, collect all the data, make all the decisions in MY car, other cars be damned...or, ignored.
My guess is V2V just presented too many security holes to win widespread adoption. If you could go around spoofing braking events on the highway, that would be super dangerous. But that's just my guess.
As to talking with cars around you, get a ham radio license, and set your HT to 146.52 MHz -- the national simplex calling frequency. The more people we have monitoring 146.52, the better. That frequency, more than any other ham radio frequency, is the nationwide "SOS!" channel. If you have an emergency out of cellphone range, but you have an HT, often 'somebody' will hear you on 146.52 and can call for help. The other common calling frequency is 446.000 but 2 meters tends to have better range through forest terrain; and probably more people listen to "52" than 446.000 --- but try both in an emergency.
There's IEEE 1609 series of standards. I haven't looked at it since 2009, so no clue how actively used/deployed that is though.
I feel like limits on EIRP are overly conservative and restrict the usefulness of phased arrays. If the limit were on total radiated power, then your 1 watt WiFi router could have the range of a kilowatt transceiver with a reasonable number of antenna elements, while emitting the same total power as interference. But since the limit is on EIRP, the phased array is limited to the same range, and so there's no point in using a phased array over a single antenna.
Does anyone know if there's a good reason to use EIRP that I'm missing? I figure satellite communication terminals can have huge EIRPs because they're all pointed at the sky, but the FCC can't guarantee that the beams won't cross for other bands, so they limit the EIRP, but I still think we would all be better off of our systems were spatially selective.
If you use a directive antenna to concentrate the radiated power into a small solid angle, to reach a distant receiver, you also increase in the same proportion the interference for another receiver that is located in the same direction as yours, but which does not want to receive your signal.
So limiting EIRP provides a limit for the interference suffered by a receiver that happens to be in the direction towards which you transmit, for which it does not matter at all which is the total power that you transmit in all directions.
True, but it dissuades folks from using directional signals, broadcasting RF energy in more directions and increasing the noise floor for everyone. I feel like there should be some sort of middle point here.
EIRP is good at reducing uintentional interference. After all, you'd probably wouldn't like me pointing a 20 element yagi antenna through your house, denying your ability to use the spectrum in a reasonable manner, just so I could do a point-to-point fixed link.
EIRP minimizes regulations. It's a good trade-off over operator and installation licencing.
It sounds like this is very definitely targeted at high speed personal-area-networks.
Yes, for the same reason that I can look into a 5mW LED but 5mW of laser can blind me. Your neighbour's WiFi routewr might be entirely DoS'd by the Maser of RF coming through the wall at it from your phased array, even thoughh it's only 100mW.
Sure, but the probability would be low-ish of that happening, and the other system could either switch frequencies or beamform a null in the direction of the interferer if they were also a phased array.
Maybe the EIRP shouldn't be unlimited, but I still think it would be beneficial to encourage spatially selective systems.
This (and the parent) really sound super interesting to me, but I don't understand. Before I spend hours on Wikipedia reading about EIRP and phased array (and probably give up), is there a chance one of you could explain this briefly in words I may understand? :)
Modern MIMO is about utilizing the combined channel efficiently, not necessarily beam forming. In most cases you can still extract more capacity from a channel with two or more antennas within the same EIRP envelope as a single antenna.
Wondering if this will spur innovators' handoff-based mesh networks (slow, low-bandwidth but very, very democratic).
When whitespace in television bands went unlicensed i don't know how much of that we saw: https://www.fcc.gov/general/white-space
I feel like the barrier may be whether dedicated hardware is required or not. In such a large band, 6 GHz, I would expect a lot of generalized (i.e. non-dedicated) platform hardware to be developed & offered allowing software-focused innovators to offer into the long tail of applications, including mesh network(s).
Everyone I've talked to from the LORA crowd and even some (LORA) alliance guys tells me lo-energy meshes are hard to get right. Am I missing something?
The new DECT NR+, the first non-cellular 5G standard supports mesh configuration but fixed not mobile network:
DECT NR+: A technical dive into non-cellular 5G:
https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/pos...
I wonder if ESP-NOW[0] would be useful for this. I've been toying with building some mesh-based lighting controllers for synchronizing lights. Fortunately it can be entirely static (number of nodes) which makes it an easier problem than dynamic meshes.
0: https://www.espressif.com/en/solutions/low-power-solutions/e...
Correct. Source: I do low-energy mesh networks. There are loads of tradeoffs, and a lot of it just has to do with the physical medium.
Sure, you could go with an off-the-shelf solution, but those aren't always a good fit for whatever product you're developing. If you can squeeze your bandwidth requirements to an absolute minimum, say, tens of kilobits, you can accomplish absolutely nutty stuff with a cheap LoRa radio and a well-designed antenna. Sure, it's tens of kilobits, but it's tens of kilobits sent and received over a mile between devices with batteries the size of your pinky.
Mesh networks are a neat idea, but the reality of is often disappointing e.g. given compatible radios all the IoT devices in a room could form a mesh network of equal peers, but if a few lightbulbs use their position (mains powered, good location) to form a hierarchical network it will actually work (without wasting battery power and air time).
This feels very pie in the sky and dreamlike. Of course some corp will figure out something to do within this space and make closed products that push out free and open uses. At least that's my pessimistic view opposed to your optimism.
If you pop open a spectrum analyzer in most places, you'll see a ghost town in the Cathedral and a hopping lively Bazaar in 2.4/5GHz. On net, it is good that more resources are going to the Bazaar.
6ghz is pretty fragile -- i can't imagine one product "pushing out" another when a wall will block the signal. Just don't have the closed products in your home, and the open ones should work just fine...
Given the fragility of signals at these frequencies, how useful is this?
By that I mean that they're easily blocked, diffracted, whatever.
Fragility is a benefit; it reduces interference. This could be used for wireless VR goggles, for example.
Has there been any studies on the health effects that might arise from using these frequencies so close to the brain?
The alleged/misunderstood "fragility" can be exploited though. A lot of residential walls are gypsum board, which contains a lot of water, and attenuates microwave signals.
Rather than fight this by trying to shout as loud as you can from a single AP across the house, you can put smaller, weaker APs in multiple rooms. Because of the excellent open air penetration and high frequency, you can get a multi-gig links with no interference or competition.
Can you get that down to low latency? Say less than 1ms for the hops?
As long as the signal can make it all the way from a phone in my pocket to earphones or glasses on my head it's useful.
Not much different than 5Ghz which is heavily used currently.
6ghz isn't very fragile, 60ghz is
60ghz is isn't very fragile, 600 ghz is
Do folks know if this increases the number of channels available for Wi-Fi 6e over 6GHz in the US, or does that require additional process?
Looks like it does not allow new channels for 6 GHz Wi-Fi. 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) already covers full range of FCC's allowed frequency range. IEEE committee may add new channels in 802.11bn (expected to be ratified around 2028, and commercial name will be Wi-Fi 8) but it also looks like a low probably, considering both 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6/ Wi-Fi 6e) and 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) mostly focuses on reducing the interference between different networks by reducing the collision, instead of widening the spectrum (BSS coloring, Flexible Channel Utilization etc.)
Yes and no.
It increases the number of "VLP" channels.
6GHz has 3 modes of operation:
1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz.
2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz 3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).can anyone explain what this will enable, that previously was not possible?
It increases the number of "VLP" channels.
6GHz has 3 modes of operation:' 1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz. Very Low Power: 25 mW (14 dBm) power.. with -5 dBm/MHz PSD, indoor and outdoor usage. Think of short range use-cases like smartphone to laptop or smartphone to earbuds/ARVR. 2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz Low Power Indoor: 1W (30 dBm) power with 5 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); only indoor usage. Think of your home router. 3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK Standard Power: 4W (36 dBm) power with 23 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); indoor or outdoor usage. Requires Aautomated Frequency Coordination; send your location to cloud, cloud tell you which channels area available. Think of enterprise or high power routers; outdoor point to point links (WISP)
So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).
This will allow better channel availability (low latency, higher throughput) for mobile applications in very dense areas..
Devices can now use all 1,200 MHz of the 6 GHz band, which was previously restricted. This move supports newer tech standards like Wi-Fi 6E and sets the stage for Wi-Fi 7.
> 1,200 megahertz of the 6 GHz band
Spectrum allocation is very weird.
It would be wonderful if we could increase Bluetooth bandwidth by switching to this new spectrum.
I think that is exactly what they are going for.
Can someone translate this into maximum usable range please
In general, its good for:
* indoor unobstructed environments
* outdoor point-to-point line-of-sight
It is a holiday miracle for small low power handheld devices.
We'll need to know the ERP limits for these bands before designing any changes.
However, hypothetically even 5W to 8W could open space networks (C band)
Neat. So with let’s say, neighborhood repeaters, you could potentially get pretty far with this, I guess.
> It is a holiday miracle for small low power handheld devices.
Is it really? Isn't the signal blocked if a person simply walks between he devices? i.e. if you are wearing a receiver and just turn around you will lose connection.
It's line of sight only. Think about it like a flashlight. If you have a flashlight (w/power) up on top of a skyscraper roof or a mountainside it can be seen at very long distances. At street level it goes till the next small rise in the ground.
Range for the newly-available parts of the 6 GHz band will not be substantially different from range for the 5 GHz band and the portions of the 6 GHz band that were already available for uses like WiFi.
I think you're confusing this with the 60 GHz band (WiGig)
Was this band used for anything else previously?
I hope other jurisdictions follow suit so hardware using it can be cheaper due to economies of scale. The segmentation of LoRA radios between US/EU is already pretty annoying and they're fairly niche.
Satellite communications, point-to-point microwave systems, and other similar things (high-data-rate, point-to-point communication) all operate near this band. However, there's plenty of spectrum and the use cases may be declining. There were also some radar systems in this band, but IIRC the useful new radar systems are higher-frequency (10's of GHz for resolution) or lower-frequency (10's-100's of MHz to have longer range).
From the press release:
> expand very low power device operations across all 1,200 megahertz of the 6 GHz band alongside other unlicensed and Wi-Fi-enabled devices.
Unless I am missing something, this means Wifi6 currently operates in this range.
6E does, not 6.
EU planing open 169 MHz for ISM (free) communications but trouble is distance. This band is world
Wasn't this already done for Wi-fi 6e? We have commercial routers already supporting 6GHz channels
6GHz has 3 modes of operation:
1) VLP: can now happen in 1200 MHz (5925 MHz to 7125 MHz); previously it was only 850 MHz. Very Low Power: 25 mW (14 dBm) power.. with -5 dBm/MHz PSD, indoor and outdoor usage. Think of short range use-cases like smartphone to laptop or smartphone to earbuds/ARVR.
2) LPI: already allowed in full 1200 MHz Low Power Indoor: 1W (30 dBm) power with 5 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); only indoor usage. Think of your home router.
3) SP: allowed in 850 MHz; no plan to expand AFAIK Standard Power: 4W (36 dBm) power with 23 dBm/MHz PSD (clients are 6 dB lower); indoor or outdoor usage. Requires Aautomated Frequency Coordination; send your location to cloud, cloud tell you which channels area available. Think of enterprise or high power routers; outdoor point to point links (WISP)
So, this new regulation is only for VLP and will result in more (especially 320 MHz) channels. No change to the most common usage of Wi-Fi (Router to Laptop/PC).
Url changed from https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-opens-entire-6-ghz-band-ver..., which points to this.
[shaky conspiratorial theory]
I wonder if this was in motion for a while and then intentionally accelerated to ensure it happens under Biden.
Optically it's a pretty pure win. Open stuff sounds good. Less regs sounds good. Tech sounds good. And it's not something that has a corresponding voting block opposing. Just pure upside politically.
Either party would love that.
Yes good conspiracy, vote for trump or biden. Nothing about personal data or tracking.
Is there any merit to non-ionizing frequencies having harmful impacts on human biological function, I thought so, but is it all "conspiracy" and laughed out of the room or a legitimate scientific part of these discussions?
I'm not a physicist or biologist but what's always made sense to me is that anytime you walk outside during the day you are bathed in broad spectrum radiation from the sun. So anything weaker than the sun is probably safe enough. Anything a million or billion times weaker is probably a million or billion times safer. We already know when and how radios get dangerous (large transmission towers, microwave ovens, etc) and how to mitigate that danger. Inverse cube law and somesuch.
The sun is damaging because it contains ionizing radiation (radiation that is powerful enough to directly disassociate a molecule into ions). This is the UV portion of sunlight.
UV starts at 800,000 GHz.
The 6Ghz being discussed here is completely non-ionizing, not even comparable to UV.
The only concern with 6Ghz is that is can also cause dielectric heating, which is the same as a microwave. But again, at 25mW, you can't even feel the heat from direct contact with the antenna, let alone a few meters away. Your exposure follows the inverse-square law [1], which means that it drops proportional to the square of the distance. So if it's not a problem at 10cm, it's 100x less of a non-problem at 1m.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse-square_law
evolutionary argument is humans are aligned with broad spectrum radiation from the sun, but not the artificial forms which have different magnitudes in different frequencies.
Eg: you are much less likely to get sunburn if you get plenty of natural (or artificial) infrared.
Microwave frequencies can harm biological function through heating tissue; in particular eyeballs have lots of water and poor ability to dissipate heat. However, very low power densities are almost certainly safe.
[edit]
Another example of non-ionizing radiation harming human tissue would be if you stick your hand in front of a cutting laser. Maybe obvious, but you asked...
Most concerns focus around the electromagnetic radiation heating your tissue. Microwave ovens operate at 2.4MHz, and most common frequencies can work like a microwave with varying efficiency. At the intensities of normal transmissions that isn't really a concern. For a time this seemed like something we might worry about with phones, since during a phone call there we have an active antenna right next to your fairly sensitive brain that might not like being heated up. But even there it turned out that the effect was too small to be of concern
Ham radio operators do need to worry about radio exposure safety for heating. But we are using much higher powers, 100W is normal HF radio, and 1500W is the limit. 5W handheld next to head is safe. Also, the
25mW is nothing.
Is there any theorizing or research being done around potential non-heating harmful effects of non-ionizing radiation?
>Microwave ovens operate at 2.4MHz
2.4GHz
There's merit. Just to complex to understand and unpleasant to realize.
Eg of research indicating we should at least do more deep research before calling it "Safe": https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9189734/
There’s none other than localized heating effects, and yes, it’s laughed out of the room.
So, obviously you don’t want to microwave your eyeballs, but you’d feel that in other nearby tissues as heat. If you don’t feel heat from a non-ionizing RF source, you’re not getting cooked. In any case, the amount of infrared coming off an incandescent lightbulb is about 3 orders of magnitude higher than the energy coming off a WiFi router antenna. If being in the room with a lightbulb is safe, so is being in the room with WiFi.
There isn’t a set of rules of physics where low-power, non-heating, non-ionizing RF is dangerous, and also where CPUs work. They’re incompatible. You can’t have both of those at the same time.
> There isn’t a set of rules of physics where low-power, non-heating, non-ionizing RF is dangerous, and also where CPUs work. They’re incompatible. You can’t have both of those at the same time.
Please elaborate on this? But it sounds like you're overgeneralizing. There's a lot of ways non-ionizing RF could potentially be "dangerous" to some kind of biological tissue, we just haven't found those ways in humans.
For one category of mechanism, there's plenty of proteins that absorb certain wavelengths and activate cellular pathways based on the amount they receive.
We honestly don’t know. Current safety standards mostly focus on preventing tissue heating, because that’s the one effect we can reliably measure and understand. But there’s a chunk of exploratory research out there looking at potential “non-thermal” effects—things like subtle shifts in cell signaling, membrane permeability, or oxidative stress—that might not show up as a measurable temperature increase.
So far, the studies that have been well-designed and replicated haven’t consistently nailed down a clear causal link between non-thermal EMF exposure (within the limits that regulators consider safe) and actual health problems. Still, some researchers argue that we’re not accounting for all the slow-burn, cumulative effects that might be happening. It’s not easy to tease out these subtle influences from the noise of environmental variables, and that makes it hard to really say we’ve got a handle on the whole picture. Check out Prof Michael Levin's Bioelectricity work if you want to go down a very interesting rabbit hole about what we're only recently discovering about how our biology might really work and how electricity and emf's shape it.
With a large enough antenna and enough power you can cook your neighbor.
The ham radio licensing procedure in the US mostly focuses on this effect. Even though there's nothing conclusive I'd imagine there are other deleterious effects that aren't trivially measurable. If it can heat it up it can do other stuff too. Cooking your brain by standing too close to a high power transmission tower can't be good.
I'm an amateur extra, I would challenge any "scientist" laughing EMF dangers off to go find the nearest AM radio tower and spend 6 months in the transmission room for "science".
Without sarcasm, the studies I have found over the years ruled out cumulative effects (unlike ionizing radiation). They so far haven't been able to rule out various types of cancer, ALS, or other diseases caused by long-term exposure.
I also have an extra license. AM transmits up in the ballpark of 50,000W. Anything at 50,000W with toast you like a marshmallow. That has nothing to do with RF, but with the sheer amounts of power pumping through it.
I am plausibly a "scientist" who has done "science", and I'm not standing next to a AM radio tower for precisely the same reason I wouldn't stand next to a 50,000W light bulb, EMF be darned.
It's not on studies to rule out all the things you mention. The job of studies is to demonstrate that EMF does cause any of them. "EMF is safe" is falsifiable: if you can find one counterexample, it's untrue. And yet, after all the years we've been working with it, other than people who get cooked from sheer power levels, we don't have any proof that it causes those (or any) diseases.
Yes, there is evidence, but as usually you will get downvoted to oblivion before you can get the point across.
One of the things being pointed to are these EMFs effecting ion channels. The TRPV1 receptor is one of these channels. The TRPV1 receptor is a heat receptor but has many functions. Since this receptor is in the skin 5G and 6G can effect it. The receptor pumps calcium into the cell, and any neurologist will tell you what that can do.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6592873/
Well the microwave oven is an example of non-ionising frequencies having harmful impacts on human biological function.
I like how they list their Twitter account
Does this mean Unifi will sell outdoor WiFi 7 APs with 6Ghz transceivers?
It specifically says this is not for use with fixed wireless infrastructure, so no.
Seems like that will also limit the uses for outdoor IoT applications, like wireless sensing in farm fields or wireless management of solar panels or industrial applications. Outdoor mobile applications seem to be allowed, but that may be of limited use if there is nothing outside to talk to. Maybe using robots or mobile platforms to create a mobile network with wide continuous coverage would be a work-around? For example vehicle-to-vehicle communications.
Why don't they make it an auctioned band but only with individual natural persons eligible for joining it?
On tomorrow's news: "FCC AUTHORIZES DEVICES TO EMIT MICROWAVE RADIATION!"