UTD Lifts Ban On WiFi Equipment

boredMDer writes "As seen in this /. story, the University of Texas in Dallas had issued a ban on students operating 2.4 GHz WiFi equipment. However, UTD has now lifted said ban, because of 'the discovery of an FCC ruling prohibiting such a move.'"

Re:Kind of Nice..

[Zorilla]

Of course, I believe the main critisism of said actions by the FCC is that they're good ideas, just poor execution. The Do-Not-Call list has workarounds for compainies that have "business partners", and the spam bounties only really work if spamming was actually easily defined as illegal in the first place.

I should probably stay away from the boob incident. It didn't bother me one bit.

Told ya so

[Anonymous Coward]

There were several postings on the original story that pointed out the FCC rules. Does anyone know if they were instrumental in getting the ban lifted? ie. Did a student see a posting and then point out the rules to the university?

Re:Kind of Nice..

[fimbulvetr]

On the contrary, they were not workarounds, they were fairly legit considering the alternatives. For instance, 1-800-contacts can still call me when my contact perscription expires, because I've already had a _business_ relationship with them. The fcc would have been laughed at if it tried to prevent said things from being done. The law would have been turned into a joke.
On the other hand, the law was a joke for a time, but now I only get 1 call a week from telemarketers. It could have been (and WAS) _a lot_ worse.

Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I lived at Waterview... me and my friends didn't have all this fancy shmancy wireless stuff, so we buried hundreds of feet of coax cable underground between multiple apartments.

Sure it wasn't too efficient, but it was fun.

Rights

[gr8_phk]

So is it like: The law says you have the right to use the unlicenced spectrum? Or is it that ONLY the FCC can regulate the spectrum? How does this compare to Non-disclosure agreements restricting your first amendment rights? Or any other contract that allows one to voluntarily restrict your rights? I bet the school can disallow guns on campus as a condition of attending. You mean the FCC has more power than the constitution? I'm confused - not taking sides, just confused.

Any lawyers in the house?

Re:No. No they aren't

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The university has no right to prohibit legal electronic equipment in the dorm...true. But the FCC has no right to force private property owners to allow the university to do something just because it has police and a military to back up their decision. Its utterly arbitrary.

This is actually one of the few areas where the FCC should be regulating things - their job was (and still should be limited to) regulating the use of the airwaves and preventing interference. 2.4GHz is declared as free to all comers with some power restrictions, so declaring that all bans on equipment use (outside of FCC rules) makes perfect sense.

Re:This was predicted time and time again

[Detritus]

It bothered me. Not because I have an aversion to looking at unclothed women. My immediate reaction was that this was a stupid and deliberate attempt to be shocking or "extreme", dreamt up by some moron in the marketing department at MTV. People, including families, who tune in the Superbowl, shouldn't be subjected to that sort of crap.

Re:Wifi cards choosing wrong access points

[lukewarmfusion]

At my brother's school, someone (they think it was a student) set up a wireless access point designed to act and look like an official University AP. Unfortunately, it was NOT official - which meant that it did a great job of pulling down all the data that had gone through it. Like passwords, emails, and credit card numbers.

I understand their move, even if I don't agree with it. I just think maybe they went about it the wrong way.

What should I tell my school about this?

[FooAtWFU]

My school [wfu.edu] has a new spiffy wireless network too, but they still have an old wired one. Nevertheless I believe I have seen a regulation [wfu.edu] stating that no access points [wfu.edu] are to be allowed on campus, and that certain varieties of cordless phones were going to be, if not banned, Strongly Strongly discouraged. I'm "in" with the technology program here (evaluating the occasional gadget, like the new printer/scanner/copier devices) so I know how to inform these people of stuff like this.

It seems that they are more interested in banning the devices which use this part of the spectrum rather than the actual use. Would this make any difference? I mean, they're already banning toasters and the like (though it's not that people who like toast can't find it anyway . . .)

Personal experience at UTD

[A non moose cow]

I had an apartment at UTD and thought it was cool that I could get free Internet access through the schools wireless. I previously had a setup of three machines that were connected to a wired router and from there to a DSL line. When I moved into the UTD Waterview apartments, I just bought a wireless bridge to plug into the wan side of my router.

The lan side of my router was serving DHCP. I had to plug the bridge into the lan side in order to configure it. Once it was configured, there was an immediate tug of war between the campus dhcp serving 10.x.x.x and my router serving 192.168.x.x.

If I got a 10.x.x.x address, I could use the campus network with my bridge on the inside of my network. My anttenna was apparenlty stronger than the campus antennas at that point, because when I looked at my router's arp table, I saw that I had actually served 200+ campus machines a 192.168.x.x ip address. Since my router had nowhere to route that traffic, I had effectively broken the campus network for a signifigant number of machines.

The reason this happened is that the campus antenna network is pretty weak. So weak in fact that once I had everything set up to play nicely, I realized that My machine was often starving for an IP address or more bandwidth. I ended up ordering Comcast Cable. I actually considered plugging my bridge back into the lan side of my router so people could use my Comcast connection when I wasn't using it.

BTW, the UTD campus Wifi can be a pain to use, because when connecting, you must always use a web browser first. The UTD system intercepts your first web traffic and throws you back a campus wifi login page instead. Once you log in, all types of traffic are allowed. The problem with this is that if the first thing you do is open usenet, or check pop email, etc. It just appears that the connection is down because you have not logged in yet.

I didn't get around to it, but I was going to have a similar scheme where people who connected to my router would be served a page that said, "this is not UTD internet access, it is a private Comcast connection. click Ok to verify that you understand this, or click quit to attempt to get to the UTD network again" I also wanted the page to have a check boxes for "remember me and always accept this alternate connection when available", and another for "remember me, and always reject this alternate connection because I'm not sure I trust it". A record of mac addresses would allow me to do that.

another thing this experience made me realize, is that with my Comcast connection and the campus ssid, I could offer wireless access silently to anyone who was in range, which would allow me to eyeball all of their traffic at leisure.