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Channel 13 crashes public Wireless at The Event

A little-known fact: in Europe, WiFi wireless has 13 channels. In America, it has only 11. Does this matter? Well, yes! - if you've bought an FCC approved adapter for your PC, it does, and it caused chaos at today's WLAN Event in Olympia.

The Event didn't just have one public WLAN in Olympia 3 exhibition area - it had over 30. There are still people who think this isn't going to cause problems, but the people who were trying to keep the access point going wouldn't agree, and they set about a serious attempt to repair the mess.

The result was that for many people, the official network simply vanished.

What happened, according to the company which was operating the official network, was that they went around all the exhibitor booths, asking people to use either Channel 1 or Channel 7; and then they moved the official network - with several access points - to Channel 13.

But most cheap cards imported into this country from American manufacturers are made to FCC specifications. That does not allow them to operate on Channel 13. So all Channel 13 broadcasts were invisible to them.

Embarrassingly, it turns out that this limitation also applies to all Intel Centrino systems. Intel has built the chip set with an FCC-approved wireless.

Dennis Eaton, chairman of the WiFi Alliance told NewsWireless.Net that the problem would be easily solved. "If people abide by the 802.11d standard, then the behaviour of the chip set will automatically detect whether it is in an ETSI European approval area, or in an American FCC area; if it sees Channel 13, it will enable itself to use it," he said. "That is part of the standard WiFi spec, but it just hasn't been enabled by some firmware yet."

Intel told worried customers at the Event that it wasn't a problem. "We were informed that if we wanted to build laptops with Channel 13, we just had to tell the factory to build them," said a source at Fujitsu Siemens. "We aren't exactly sure how this should be done, but they assured us it wasn't a problem, and we'd be able to sort it out."

Effectively, this means that the number of channels available for public hotspots in Europe is limited to 11. It may prove possible eventually to assume that American tourists have 802.11d compliant WiFi cards or systems, but for now, the need to cater for the maximum number of users means that Channel 13 will be restricted to personal applications, and private networks.

It may also mean that those who sell fully ETSI compliant access points will charge extra for them. Not only will there be a smaller market, but they will attract a premium value for those who want to make it even harder than otherwise for hackers to get access to private networks.