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Comment by dbalan | Hacker News Reader

Is this limited to devices sold in the US? They are going to impose it on every other place that sells them?

Afiu tp-link has no obligations to manage two devices trees for a niche community. Stubborn minority effect at play here. [1] http://fooledbyrandomness.com/minority.pdf

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That's something I'm also wondering about.

IIRC, the first thing my stock WDR3600 firmware asked me about was which country I am in, which means that frequency locking can be easily bypassed (not power levels, though).

To make this as bulletproof as FCC wants they would have to make separate firmware image for the US and prevent US firmwares from being "upgraded" to non-US.

edit:

And this is exactly what they did:

Recent US firmware (e.g. Archer C7 v2 151014 US) do not install unsigned firmware, including earlier versions of firmware and international versions. Thank you, FCC.

Source: http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/archer-c5-c7-wdr7500

Question: if a manufacturer has their radios/devices blessed by the FCC are they blessing the software the comes a long with it?

Would there be a gray market for international versions of routers because they're the exact same hardware and not as locked? If I'm a manufacturer I certainly don't want a whole new BOM variation just for US devices if I can solve the problem with software.

That stubborn minority chapter is really quite interesting, shame the book isn't available yet. Think I'll look into some of the authors prior books when I next run out.

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