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."
No, but its a step closer to a high degree of coverage.
Also this one is free... Most existing links are incredibly expensive for the the Africans due to the absence of fair peering agrements.
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
There is a huge loop of fiber going all the way around Africa that was put there during the dotcom boom by a company called Africa One. Apparently it is mostly dark, because no one can pay to use it:
See here for a large pic.
More info:
Wired News
Lucent
Some interview
So this is interesting for wireless sake, but not interesting for the sake of Internet connectivity in Africa. This fiber loop needs to be put to use to enable cheap Internet in Africa. Many Internet connections are still done by satellite, which is expensive and slow.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
Does anyone else remember seeing that? I can't seem to find a link.
Sure, here it is. Scroll down for pictures.
For us non-metric system Americans
The rules vary between country. Encryption and commercial use is generally not allowed. Discussing politics or religion is frowned upon.
BBS operators enforce the rules or risk their licenses.
Before the internet largly killed off packet radio in the UK it was mostly 1200baud with a throughput on a shared half duplex bbs channel of about 20 bytes per second. Some people had faster point to point links which didn't make much difference to the overall experiance due to the slow links between bbs's.
Discussions and file transfers took place in a store and forward manner similar to newsgroups and fidonet. It took a few weeks for a message to get from Europe to Australia. People generally left their computers on for a few hours to download a days messages and read offline.
A small number of people played with TCP/IP but I don't think they ever routed traffic over more than small regions.
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.
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.
I worked on a nine mile shoot last year going across a shipping channel. Remember that it is not like a laser, there is a cone of coverage going both directions called the fresnel zone. You must maintain at least 60% coverage in this zone to keep communications up ( check out http://www.firstmilewireless.com/calc_fresnel.html ) It is quite easy to calculate curvature of the earth, antenna height on both sides, distance between antennas, and finally how big a ship would have to be to block more than 40% of the fresnel zone and drop the connection. In a sense you are right, but it does work quite a bit better than you think.