[lelandbatey]

Alright, after searching on this a little bit more, it seems that the FCC is not prohibiting the installation of software like OpenWRT or DD-WRT, but are instead mandating that there is software for the radios only that ensures they operate in the manner they are certified for.

There is much more information in the HN comments from a previous time where this was discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9959088

[wtallis]

Given appropriately designed radio hardware, this would be a non-issue. But given the radios that are on the market right now, this could be a very bad thing in the short term for the most open products that are the only affordable platforms for further R&D of Linux-based wireless router software. Anything that would take ath9k hardware off the market before an equally-open successor is available would be more damaging than any interference these products are capable of producing.

[Gibbon1]

I mess with radio's at work. The there are two issues.

Often for testing one wants to check the radio operation outside the normal band or modes of operation. In my case, sweeping the radio across a really wide and band noting where the pll fails to lock. I'm going to really twitchy if I can test the pll at frequencies outside the band. Doing things like, turn off spreading and checking carrier and tx power. I'm sure more complicated radio's than I use have similar.

The second is what is legal varies depending on where the product is sold and used. So so a mode that's legal in one country is verboten in another.

In general though, I'd rather hate for the FCC to try and force manufacturers to lock people out. Because likely it won't work well and there is a definite cost to implementing secure boot. But then again the FCC is historically extremely hostile to the idea of ordinary people mucking with wireless. So this doesn't surprise me at all.

[the_ancient]

This is where technical regulations meet with real world implementation. To have a "locked down" radio will increase the cause of the Appliance, computers and other devices. Manufacturers will take the cheapest way to implement these regulations, the cheapest way will be to lock down the entire device. An example of this is the Lenovo WiFi White lists in BIOS, there are other ways for Lenovo to comply with the regulation but it is cheaper to simply only allow approved wifi modules instead of implement a more costly solution

So while the rules may not directly ban custom firmware, that will be the implementation result of these regulations. less than 1% of consumers ever customize their devices so if a manufacturer even has to Spend $0.01 more per device to enable the ability to customize they will not do it.

[TD-Linux]

The lab guidelines mention DD-WRT by name.