There’s another good story over at CNet about the (pretty moronic) FCC petition filed by Sirius and XM Satellite Radio that proposes new limits on the stray interference caused by wireless networks. At issue is the fact that the two satellite radio systems transmit on a bandwidth very near that used by the 2.4 GHz wireless network standard (otherwise known as 802.11b, or WiFi), and the makers are worried that the networking equipment will cause enough interference to prevent the satellite radios from succeeding.

As is typical, though, my sense is that this is an issue of a company being pissed that their business model isn’t succeeding due to circumstances that they didn’t take into effect. You can see that in two big problems with the FCC petition: the companies are demanding a lower emission limit for others than they themselves are limited to, and the limit that they propose is actually 8 dB below the thermal noise floor (roughly meaning that the interference that results from random thermal noise in the environment is greater than what they are proposing WiFi manufacturers be limited to).