is it really "illegal" to set your wifi channel range to a non UK range?

[Golf1.6]

Some residential properties, especially flats are often flooded with wifi hotspots all competing with the 11 wifi channels.

5GHz is thankfully very quiet (part of it is probably that the range is so bad that it can't interfere with neighbours too far out).

Anyways, I noticed that the router allows me to set the country, and when doing so it opens up a whole host of different channel ranges at 5Ghz.

The router does so that it may be illegal to set the country to something other than one you a currently based at. So if I'm in the UK I should not set the location to USA to use ghz channels that potentially nobody else will ever use.

Of course I have no intention of doing his I'm the only one with a 5ghz network in my area, just interested in knowing for academic purposes

 

[Golf1.6]

I see, in the UK range there are just 4 different channels at 5ghz, in the US range there are 8.

It's perfect right now because hardly anyone else is using it and ISP routers will still push 2.4Ghz because of the range benefits of it (and the fact that 2.4ghz chips are cheap). But what happens when 5Ghz becomes the standard. Won't the limitation of just 4 channels cause interruptions or does 5ghz not be as affected by channel "traffic" as much as 2.4ghz.

 

[Golf1.6]

Things like bluetooth, microwaves, etc uses 2.4GHz as well so as well as other wireless networks it's easy for it to be heavily congested. There are less things that uses 5GHz so it will be a lot less congested and affected from interference.

EDIT: Pretty sure there's more than 4 channels: http://wifinigel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/wifi-channels-on-5ghz-in-uk.html

goods to know, it's just my cheap ac router that only supports 4 channels then..

 

[Golf1.6]

i used inssider and found that channel 8 was the preferreed channel as nobody was using it.