They are struggling with a very simple problem. If you configure your 5GHz U-NII device to the wrong country, and turn it on, it will stomp all over licensed/re

They are struggling with a very simple problem. If you configure your 5GHz U-NII device to the wrong country, and turn it on, it will stomp all over licensed/restricted spectrum. That's because unlike 2.4GHz, 5GHz has been carved up very differently in different parts of the world (each place has had its own evolution of technology and spectrum pressures). To such a degree that this isn't even about power and frequency. As an FCC registrant seeking to slap FCC stickers on your new/imported devices, you'll be required to submit proof of conformance documentation which demonstrates you've properly implemented radar avoidance in your frequency hopping/spread spectrum algorithms. Finally, the FCC has made it obvious that this aimed at the transmitter module, not the overall device. And so, "banning" OpenWRT and other 3rd-party/alt firmwares would only be required if that's the only half-arsed way a manufacturer can hope to comply with the new regs. In future, I'd hope hardware becoming better isolated from radio components, this ruling (and similar around the world) are essentially mandating region-locked devices, so we might see something similar to what's happening in mobile phones (Eg. baseband radio firmware separately versioned/updated from OS firmware).