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New Wi-Fi Distance Record Set In Utah

Posted by timothy on from the put-access-points-on-chairlift-poles dept.

cold_sake writes "Wireless guru Rob Flickenger details the known records for Wi-Fi link distances on his latest blog. Included is a new distance record for an un-amplified Wi-Fi link, set by the students of Utah's Weber State University. 82 miles was accomplished with 802.11b."

8 of 321 comments (clear)

  1. With Distances this great... by Azadre · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will it be possible that wireless internet will become the default in the next five years over traditional phone/cable? With distances this far, would it be too hard to set it up in rural areas and provide low cost broadband?

    1. Re:With Distances this great... by Beatbyte · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Interesting? You didn't even read the article. Its directional microwave.

      Impossible to setup in rural areas. You would have to have a directional antenna for each user. Any more than 10 users and thats going to be a cluster-f$%@ of a guyed tower.

      --
      Get paid to code OSS
    2. Re:With Distances this great... by CaptBubba · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Not if my WISP is any indication of the direction wireless is headed.

      Current problems I have encountered:
      Frequent dropped connections, hourly most of the time, will come back after a min or so
      Not able to scale well. As I said a few months ago, wired networks merely slowed down when the viruses hit in Sept, the wireless network simply turned off for about a month until it was fixed
      Packetloss, very bad at times
      Then there's also the whole security issue

      That's not including the company-specific problems I have had (aformentioned month-long blackout, nonexistant after-buisness-hours support, etc). Not to mention that I don't have a real IP address, just 10.0.x.x, useless for a lot of stuff. I suppose this makes sense when you have a wildly fluctuating mass of people on your service, but it is still a pain. All this may just be one bad experience, but it has led to a distrust of the idea of 802.11a/b/g wireless deployed on a large scale

      Some of the trouble likely stems from the open frequency band 802.11b uses. I can only guess the packetloss spikes are from somebody else in the complex using the microwave or something. Of course, you can do what my WISP did and get the apartment complex/housing area to ban all private APs ($300 per day of operation fine, ouch!), but that still does nothing about 2.4GHz wireless phones, cheap microwaves, and other devices that could interfere. Not to mention: what happens if it rains? I doubt a long distance microwave link would take too kindly to a lot of moisture in the atmosphere.

      On a side note, since I will obviously be dropping this ISP in favor of DSL or cable as soon as my contract comes up, am I pretty much SOL in terms of their wireless AP ban? I mean, running multiple drops of cat-5e to every room is doable, but I'd like to avoid it if possible. I get the feeling that this is a grey area where they can pretty much say whatever they want.

    3. Re:With Distances this great... by DarkSarin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I don't know as much as I should, but since my brother is in the business, I feel I need to comment. Most of your Microwave links are fairly hardened against weather. Yeah, it cuts down range, but you would build two towers at the extreme end of the range.

      The upshot of this is that you might consider towers every 40 mi, which is still respectable, but then it leaves you with the rather serious problem of how to connect this to the people on the ground. It sounds to me like a way to shoot data across a large distance, and then distribute. The sad part about this is that they are using 802.11b. The slow speeds make it less than ideal for large numbers of users.

      Instead, why not use one of the more powerful antennas available from Proxim (the Tsunami does like 430 Mbps (full duplex) at 5 miles), and if you need greater range, there are antennas that can handle that (although they are slower)), or a similar company. Many of their antennas are license exempt, but still operate outside th 2.4GHz band (5.8GHz, typically). The only one that is licensed operates at 23 GHz (wow!).

      At one point I was looking into starting a WISP, but decided that the rollout was a little too high initially. Instead I went back to school.

      --
      "We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
  2. Why does my wireless account at Weber suck? by MikeDawg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seems amazing especially because of the close by mountain range.

    Now can someone explain to me why I have such difficulty connecting to their wireless network while I'm on campus?

    --

    YOU'RE WINNER !
    Another lame blog

  3. I wonder what they tweaked by PureFiction · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The 802.11b MAC layer is fairly sensitive to timing latency. (I go into more detail on this article on timing in long 802.11 links)

    Did they use the old ad-hoc demo peer to peer mode, which has no ACK's and performs much better over longer links?

    Cisco cards are also well known for their quality; perhaps the cisco MAC can adapt to high latency long shots while also working well in infrastructure mode.

    Does anyone have more details on exactly how tenuous this link was, and how they pulled it (card settings, cables, antennas?)

    As a side note, myself and some others have been wondering how we might go about discerning the exact timing characteristics of different 802.11 MAC implementations using non-exotic hardware (like regular cards in monitor mode).

    When you need to measure microseconds (or fractions of them) it gets tricky...

  4. BFD by avgrunt357 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Big F'n Deal.

    If you look at the map, they punched the signal over water.

    No wonder these eTards were able to get the distance out of it.

    Try it over land and get back to me.

  5. NOT A RECORD AT ALL!!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you read the actual blog entry, Rob refers to the actual record of 310 km (192 miles) by a Swedish team.

    Man, I know this is slashdot and no one reads the articles, but you thing the editors would once in a while.