God is a DJ, Intel is a Law (Part 1)
What happens when you violate a regulation or a law in your country? Most of you say “a punishment”. That’s completely right except a case when your government or your country is on the top of the huge subordination tree. Nowadays, transnational corporations are still below the governments or sometimes on a par. But in some cases they can decide to override laws or regulations and you have nothing to do with it. You have to deal with it.
Today I noticed that Intel can override some laws, especially Russian if we are talking about Wi-Fi. It’s better to say 802.11ax standard, but let’s make it more understandable and say Wi-Fi 6. Not so long ago this standard become a holy cow. Every newspaper write articles about it, FCC vote silently. So if modern life is about Wi-Fi, life inside the wireless camp is about Wi-Fi 6 than.
But if you will decide to join this global technology trend and by a new router with Wi-Fi 6 support, there is no any guarantee that you will get all benefits and you won’t be disappointed… if you chosen the Intel ax200 for your laptop. Yes, Intel ax200 card can root against you, look below for details.
This commit https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/11536673/ is about how to make your Wi-Fi 6 card to work in Wi-Fi 5 mode if Intel decides that Wi-Fi 6 is not allowed in your country. The most important evil is that you can’t know about it until you buy and try. Why this is happening? Very good question. It’s because of Intel's internal firmware logic and Intel’s internal policy. Ax200 module runs a firmware with additional regulation logic which will override your system configuration. So let’s imagine that your Linux or Windows network manager configure a wireless module to make a connection to your new shiny Wi-Fi 6 access point. But you don’t feel any difference and your throughput is the same as before. That’s because of Intel’s internal firmware logic. You can’t see this logic, but you can feel it when you buy a Wi-Fi 6 card and it works in Wi-Fi 5 mode. Pretty cool, huh?
That’s how unknown manager can decide that for your country Wi-Fi 6 mode will not work and it doesn’t mean that you paid for it. It’s doesn’t mean if this mode is really forbidden in your country (it is not). Unknown manager can stand above your country laws and regulations. So when you buy a new Intel ax200 card even for testing purposes, please ask a question to yourself “Is it worth it?”.
Also I can’t imagine such amount if pain when people will DDoS ISP technical support or some ISP will decide to provide Wi-FI 6 routers to his clients and face with the fact that a lot of clients have only Wi-Fi 5 connection. I will call this case as “Worst practices from Intel” because for me it feels like a sucker punch to all industry. Nobody should be forced to use “old” technology when he paid for “new”. It’s better for Intel to give up from such harmful policy and revert this patch. My colleagues say that Windows driver has the same behavior. I think Windows driver should be fixed too.
P.S this Linux patch also violates a kernel mechanism, because proprietary firmware is able to configure Linux kernel, which is not good. But it’s about a technical discussion.
