Turn Off DFS Support

[knolan]

The addition of DFS support is a very welcome development for many of your users, due to regulatory compliance issues in their countries.


In Ireland ComReg - the Irish Telecommunications Regulator has stated in April 2007 regarding DFS that

"Technology developments are at an early stage and many issues will have to be resolved before these systems would be commercially deployable"

http://www.comreg.ie/_fileupload/publications/ComReg0722.pdf (Page 19 Paragraph 2 - Conclusion)

Based on the Irish Telecommunications regulator defining DFS as not Commercially Deployable, is there any way VNC could provide a switch to turn off DFS support under the IE country code.


The reason I ask is:

Cork Community Broadband are seeing a major impact to our network since we have upgraded our nodes to v1.3.4 where even when we lock down the channels using ACL the nodes are rebooting intermitently, also it is causing proformanace issues where the bandwidth available between our backhaul nodes has been reduced on the DFS channels since the upgrade where DFS was enabled by default.


I know the DFS code is supplied to VNC by Atheros, and hopefully Atheros are working on making the DFS code more stable so that it plays better with other radios not using DFS code. but until Atheros provide this updated code, can the option be provided to disable DFS in StarV3

Thanks
Keith Nolan

[tony]

We cannot provide an option to disable DFS for country codes that require it, however you can use the 'NA' country code as a fall back, as it does not use DFS and will provide a wide range of channels.

With DFS, all clients must also support the 802.11H standard (or at least in part) in order to operate properly. Recent Windows drivers are Ok, as are our CPEs. Unfortunately, we cannot say anything on behalf of other CPE devices.

The upcoming release has some work done toward the system load / reboot artifact you are experiencing to lessen, and hopefully resolve it all together without interfering with DFS operation.

[knolan]

Tony,

All the clients of our DFS enabled channels are StarV3 1.3.4, I'd be more concerned with other WISPs using radios which don't look at DFS at all.


Thanks for the suggestion to use NA as the country code, however this only turns off DFS for 5.175 --> 5.325 which are reserved for indoor use in Ireland. The channels I'm looking to get DFS turned off for is 5.495 --> 5.705


I've sent a request to ComReg the Telecommunications Regulator in Ireland for clarification on the DFS issue, since I know most WISPs turn off DFS. When I receive feedback I will let you know the regulatory requirements in Ireland.


Regards,
Keith