Slashdot Mirror
First Free Wireless Link Between Europe And Africa
Paul Bawon writes "A company called PSAND have just installed a wireless link between Tarifa in Spain and Tangiers in Morocco, thus linking the African and European continents together with a free wireless link. The link went across the Straits of Gibraltar with a total distance of 32 km over the sea. Images can be found here and notes from the work can be found here."
Images of a wireless connection? I gotta see this.
Now all 3 computers in Africa can get internet access! Yay!
The Internet is one thing that could benefit education in poor African countries a great deal, allowing free access to information. This is just one more step in fully linking up Africa.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
Images can be found here and notes from the work can be found here .
Where's the wireless link? All I see is empty sky!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Wonderful! With this new cross-continental wireless connection, those poor, hapless widows of deposed and assassinated heads of the Nigerian government and industry can all the more easily appeal for help in moving their vast sums of wealth into foreign bank accounts!
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Not anymore. *insert joke about server being hosted via wireless link* *insert joke about african vs european swallows and their airspeed velocity using IP over avian carrier*
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
This one is not a distance record, but it did span continents and is an interesting article. Here's an article from last year about longer distances, albeit with higher power gear.
The ham radio record for 2.4 GHz is a lot longer, but it's a great start. Here are some results from Region 1, Europe, including Earth-Moon-Earth.
Here's the site for the San Bernadino Microwave Society (Hams). They've been doing this sort of thing for ages.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
PSAND.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Now if only someone could do the same for Europe and America.
There's been a lot of hurt, a lot of mean things have been said, but that's nothing a couple of million FREE fragfests couldn't patch up right? Right?
Maybe via Iceland, the Azores? Newfoundland?
Before you start, satellite isn't free. I know. I get Sky.
May the Maths Be with you!
Oh, you meant wireless TCP/IP? Why didn't you say so.
of a successful democracy is the free flow of information without government interference. I hope this is a good start for the continent. After all, there is no more free medium for the dissemination of information than the web. After all, why is China so scared of unfiltered access?
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
Forget all the predictable comments about satellite links being cheaper, the bandwidth being a bit low for a trans-continental link, etc, this proves one thing:
No matter how repressive a government becomes in its monitoring or control of internet technology, geeks the world over can use this project as a reference work: Don't like your internet strained by official censors? Just beam a link over the border to an open proxy.
People like us can use this technology to open repressed populations up to communication.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
If you look at the picture closely you can see dozens of nerds with laptops boating around.
I suppose information-bearing lasers over that distance aren't practical, but it sure could make for pretty pictures.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I'm sure the wireless signal was then immediately hustled into a rug and kaftan shop.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
I great example of how regular 802.11 wireless is showing its strengths, however you all realize there are limits. Eventually we will depend on laser transmission of data due to the massive distances it can easily cover. Furthermore, I remember seeing another test when a group of people in the middle of the Moab desert made a record of something around 30 miles with a standard cisco card and a very odd homemade antenna which was made from fine metal mesh screen and wood in a pyramid shape. Does anyone else remember seeing that? I can't seem to find a link.
Packet Radio has been providing free digital links across the globe for decades. Nothing new about this..
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Does anyone else remember seeing that? I can't seem to find a link.
Sure, here it is. Scroll down for pictures.
I'd just been thinking about the altitude required to 'see-over' the horizon to the other point. Does just 20m above sea level mean the Tangiers antenna must be very high up?
Now my maths is useless, but it says the Tarifa antenna at Castillo de Guzmán el Bueno is 20m above mean sea level and the Tangiers antenna position is unknown but 32,000m away.
From that can anyone work out the required height of the Tangiers antenna to have line of sight over the curvature of the Earth?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Pfffft. That's nothing, with Wi-LAN OFDM equipment, you can defeat multipath interference from water. We have an 80km link over water between curacao and bonaire in the carribean at 3.5 GHz (This plays hell with passing US Navy ships)
... the sales figures for Pringles in Spain and Morocco have sky-rocketed.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
For us non-metric system Americans
As reported previously on Slashdot.
All that work on connecting two continents and they can't keep a web server active.
Has anyone ever been to Tangiers? I wonder what they're going to do with this wireless link there. The place is a nest of drug dealers, thieves, prostitutes, and starving children. Hive of villainy and all that.
The major industry is in trucking goods between North Africa and Europe via ferry.
I spent a single night there a few years back, and vowed never to do so again.
Excerpts:
"You want to buy hashish? No? You CHICKEN? YOU YELLOW CHICKEN! I CUT YOU, CHICKEN!"
*Gang of Dirty ~6 Year Old Children Run Up (at ~23:00)*
"Un Dirham? Un Dirham?"
Dark Fiber on the "Dark Continent".
Please. That joke is older than, well, since it was called "The Belgian Congo".
Seems that the www.flakey.info server is... well, a bit flakey.
Anyone managed to grab content to a mirror?
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
So, now that the site is Slashdotted due to our insatiable hunger for these images, does that mean we just wiepd out the internet connection to an entire continent?
Because that'd be cool. I mean, wrong... damn wrong.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Hey There,
My friend is in the Peace Corps in West Africa.
I think they need more basic services first.
Like power.
I recently sent her a solar powered lantern...
because she has no good way to read when the sun goes down.
Previously having used candles.
Cheers,
-- The Dude
I've heard reports that the SSID will be...
Dr_Livingston
It's "TANGIER" not "TANGIERS".
It's an old city, not a mobbed-up casino.
And yes, I know I'm being extremely anal about this, but if we don't actively correct our mistakes we'll end up watching Survivor reruns and joining Oprah's book club.
For shame!
We're sorry, but we don't seem to be compatible.
Our software suggests that you're using a browser incompatible with Gmail. Gmail currently supports the following:
Microsoft IE 5.5 and newer (download: Windows)
Netscape 7.1 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )
Mozilla 1.4 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )
Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and newer (download: Windows Macintosh Linux )
Safari 1.2.1 and newer (download: Macintosh )
You are kidding right? I'm using Opera 7.5 (Id'ing as Opera), does gmail use some non-opera based code?
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
and is it laden or unladen?
one worked for me...w00t....thanks
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
....taken with a lens-less camera by a guy with no hands. Creepy.
TCP/IP over Bongo!
Is that they lose the connection every time a large ship passes through.
Article: http://mirror.us.psand.net/fadaiat/t ml
Photos : http://mirror.us.psand.net/fadaiat/photos/index.h
Unsuspecting server admin wipes sweat of brow.
It must be pointed out that the link between Europe and Africa was done as a collaborative project involving many people from Europe and Africa, not just Psand, who merely helped. The project is called Transacciones / Fadaiat 2004, an arts / technolgy / social convention dealing with issues surrounding the Straits of Gibraltar, especially immigration. The link was intended to be a short term link to allow participators from both continents to take part, share ideas and create new allegiances. Please also note that the document which goes with it is rough notes written before attempting the link, and was never meant to be fully accurate.
Sales of Pringles chips go through the roof for a straight week in Africa... /nothin
How about cheap food in Africa, before cheap internet? After all, many people in Africa are hungry, few are wondering what geeks think about star trek.
Agreed, but it's better to teach a man how to fish than to give him the fish.
Getting Africa online will increase its economy in a way you can't imagine. Sending food and money (for food and weapons) to a Third World country hasn't been much of a help over the last couple of decades, it's time to get these countries on their own feet.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
it's goood. it's a gooood thing. connecting people. hookin' 'em up. makin' a connection. goooood things.
So now all they need is a wireless link across the Sahara Desert.
Why is connecting Morocco to Spain such a big deal? Am I missing something?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
...as another poster has mentioned, you need a wifi point in the country, near a border, which would be easy enough to detect and find.
And Morocco is one of the more liberal countries in that part of the world (and don't practice internet censorship).
"Tangers antenna position: Presently unknown"...
My fellow morrocans slashdotters can confirm that any hardware left without surveillance has a pretty high chance of getting stolen/abused/resold within 10 minutes...
I even had A COP TRYING TO SELL ME BACK MY OWN WINDSCREEN WhIPPERS....( some years ago, situation has improved...)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
The original posting is somewhat inaccurate. It must be pointed out that the link between Europe and Africa was done as a collaborative project involving many people from Europe and Africa, not just Psand, who merely helped. The project is called Transacciones / Fadaiat 2004, an arts / technolgy / social convention dealing with issues surrounding the Straits of Gibraltar, especially immigration. The link was intended to be a short term link to allow participators from both continents to take part, share ideas and create new allegiances. Please also note that the document which goes with it is rough notes written before attempting the link, and was never meant to be fully accurate. I must say a hearty congratulations to all involved.
First and foremost, i don't think their wireless connection exactly covered very much of morocco. Africa is the second largest continent in the world. No one has provided North America with free internet yet, I'm not sure how someone would go about transmitting an internet connection for all of africa.
Besides the uneducated africans aren't the ones with computers. Nor are they the litterate members of teh population. Not to mention the fact that nothing on the internet (except mayb obscure linux ports) is available in Xhosa, Zulu, Tutsi, or any of the other 800+ languages and dialects
If you want to educate people in africa, send old text books. Broadcasting wireless is just silly and infeasable.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Think You what You do want, Europe has 100mW EIRP limit in 2.4GHz band, but this one is producing ~7000mW EIRP!
This is why the project had to approach the relevant authorities on either side of the Strait to get permission for the temporary trial. Thanks to the communication skills of the Fadaiat team, and the fact it was over water, it was allowed to go ahead from the two specified locations.
Are they using a Pringles can as the antenna?
Yeah, thank god we live in the west where you can leave your hardware lying around in public without a care in the world...
#!/usr/bin/english
Morocco doesn't practice internet censorship. Period.
Zeb.
Research Guide to the Palestinian-Israeli Co
Um, so Spain and Morocco are connected. This doens't mean Europe is connected to Africa.
This sounds silly, but if you ask anyone native to Morocco where their country is, they'll claim it's a "southern European" country. NOT Africa. At a gas station showing the African continent in the logo, I asked one local what the symbol was. He looked angry, and mumbled something about being in "extreme southern Europe" in reply.
Funny story. Moroccans tend to be Arab / Bedouin in ethnicity, and REFUSE to be associated with Africa / African-ness.
Global warming is neither science, nor politics. It is a religion.
Apparently it is mostly dark, because no one can pay to use it
Most fiber in a bundle is SUPPOSED to be dark at this point. To lay less than a bunch more than you initially need is incredibly pound-foolish in the long run - and even the short run.
Nearly all the cost of a fiber run is laying the cable - whether digging a trench around a continent or paying it out on the ocean floor. The incremental cost of adding fibers to the bundle, as a percentage of the cost of laying the bundle, is miniscule.
The amount of data that can be carried by a single pair of fibers is enormous. So one pair can probably handle all you can sell in the first few years. And even in that one pair, half of it is proably spare - reserved for routing around breaks by slinging the data the other way around the loop. So if you look at the contacted bandwidth versus the fiber's bandwidth, even your one "lit" fiber looks "half-dark".
But you don't just lay a pair of fibers. You need spares even initially. (Else what do you do if a fiber breaks? Dig/dredge up the run to replace it? Or use the spare fiber.) So now even with one set of spares you've doubled your capacity and not used any of the "extra". 75% "dark" and looking worse.
But what happens a couple years down the road when your capacity is all contracted out and you need more? If you laid down extra fibers you just light 'em up. If you didn't, you need to DIG ANOTHER TRENCH AROUND THE CONTNENT to lay more.
So of COURSE you spent a few percent extra, and laid maybe 20 or 50 or 100 times as many fibers as you initially need. You don't EVER want to dig that trench again.
But do you light 'em up now? Of COURSE not! The incremental cost of LAYING extra fibers is tiny. But the incremental cost of LIGHTING more is nearly the same as lighting the first ones. And every year the equipment gets cheaper and can push more data through the fibers (though not enough more to eliminate the need to light more fibers eventually). The longer you wait to light them, the more bandwidth bang for your buck - so you delay deploying the BOXES as long as possible.
Thus, if your planners had any savvy, nearly ALL your fibers are dark, and will be for decades.
But some clueless "analysts" assume that the cost of laying fiber is in direct proportion to the amount of fiber laid. So they look at how much got laid, and how much is currently lit. And they trumpet the "dark fiber" "problem" to the world, convincing investers that the far-seeing planners who laid it have wasted their investors' money. Oh HORRORS!
In fact, the people (if any) who wasted their investors' money (at least in the fiber laying process) are the ones who spent nearly as much to only lay enough fibers to handle the immediate needs.
The collapse of the long-haul market was due mainly to the fact that EVERYBODY laid fibers, assuming they could each get a big chunk of the market. Too many suppliers led to a price war that took most of 'em down.
But the "dark fiber problem" scare stories provided a bit extra push, sucking needed next-stage investment out of some companies that might have made it otherwise and leading to their demise.
As a result of this scaremongering we'll get more consolidation, and higher prices, than we otherwise would gotten without their panic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
hey,
im leaving for the congo on the second of july and have to fly over that exact stretch of water to get there. Im wondering how high that signal would be...? high enough to be picked up while in a jetliner...??
--Nate
Is this really the biggest priority of the African continent? I take it AIDS, poverty, disease and famine are taken care of then....no? I fear that wi-fi will become just another abstract thing that you will have to have, like public bathrooms. I really don't see what these projects will actually do. Like 103 miles of wi-fi in New Mexico, whoopty fucking doo, and in rest stops, who cares? I go on trips to escape technology, not lug it with me.
I hate sigs.
sorry, psand people, but is not clear that you are not the people who made the link, so, please, try to change the original article.
jaume