WiFi Whitelist: what is it based on?

[fsa03]

Hi All,

I'd like to upgrade the wireless card on my Pavilion g6 from 2012 - so, whitelist. Yes, I looked into the parts list and they are all old cards which do not support newer standards. Yes, I looked for a modded BIOS with the only result that I had to learn the hard way how to recover from a bad BIOS.

But then I saw some listings on online stores that said not to use the wireless card in HP or Lenovo products, providing a link to HP parts. So I thought: what if the whitelist is enforced on a vendor basis? If I buy a recent HP (not generic) part, will it work on the laptop (which has the whitelist) despite not existing when the laptop got its last firmware upgrade? Or do I have to stick just with the cards explicitly mentioned in the list specific for the product?

Thanks in advance for your answer, it means a lot.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You can only use one of the wifi cards listed in the service manual for your notebook, and even those may not all work.

It could come down to the only card that will work is the one that originally came with your notebook, and it would have to be replaced with the exact same card, having the exact same part number.

Some manufacturers implement BIOS whitelists to ensure that the wifi cards and antenna systems meet the government's requirements for SAR.  So they only SAR tested a few model wifi cards for each model series.

You can read more about that at the link below.

Before the (fcc.gov)

HP has pretty much discontinued the use of BIOS whitelists starting with notebooks manufactured in 2014 or later.

There are only a few models that only support certain wifi cards.

The bottom line is...if you want to upgrade to dual band wifi for your notebook, you will need to use a dual band USB wifi adapter as there are no internal dual band wifi cards that will work in your notebook's model series.

[fsa03]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to reply!

You must know that the fcc thing is BS, right? It's the official excuse, but this doesn't make it any less meaningless.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

It is what it is.