DEFCON WiFi Shootout Winners Set A Land Record

bscience writes "While attending the DEFCON 12 convention this past weekend I had the chance to see the standing ovation a group of 19 year olds received for establishing a 55.1 mile unamplified WiFi connection!" A snippet from the Wired story linked there: "Mobile warriors having trouble making a wireless connection across the hall might want to give some Ohio teens a call. This weekend they were able to make a 55-mile Wi-Fi connection. ... They might have achieved an even greater distance, Justin Rigling said, "but there was no road left."" (Here's the post from a few weeks back about the competition.)

Comments

No really.

[ItsIllak]

I don't get this. I've got a smallish house, but need two APs to cover it. I guess I'm considerably less directional, but still?!

Maybe these competitions could open up a second record of the largest diameter of coverage achieved. Maybe measured at four opposite points.

Re:No really.

[5m477m4n]

Some brands of APs have better range than others. I get pretty good range from Linksys. Also, APs generally get batter range than wireless routers. But sometimes it's nice having a smaller range, that way the guy down the street can't hack your connection or hijack your cable internet.

Re:No really.

[Trigun]

I have an Averatec laptop with built in Wi-fi and a D-link 514 Router on the 2nd floor of my house. I get 100% coverage inside my house, and can even go four or so houses in any direction. My SMC 802.11a/b card doesn't get me off my front porch.

Re:A snippet

[agentforsythe]

"Then, when they established that record, they turned off their amplifiers and broke the record for an unamplified connection at the same distance."

does that mean that the connection wasn't actually established unamplified... merely maintained?

Transfer speed

[barcodez]

I would be interested to know what kind of transfer speed they got at that distance.

Help for rural areas?

[grunt107]

Althought the article does not mention it, it does not seem like the hardware used to accomplish this was all that advanced.

If that is the case, their technology could be implemented in limited population density areas, tying back to the somewhat larger urban areas.

Take for example Iowa. There are many areas over 30 miles from any town larger than 15-30k.
Surprisingly enough, these 'large' towns have cable/phone (DSL) access.

So now the remote areas can be wifi attached to the bigger towns/cities and get the faster access (although 11b is not screaming it is better than modem).

Re:Metrics is a Milestone away

[markov_chain]

I grew up in a metric society. I used to think metric units were superior until I lived in the US for a while, and found myself doing plenty of carpentry and DIY stuff where the most common units are inches and feet. I think the subdivision of a foot into 12 inches is fantastic; it allows one to easily divide dimensions into thirds, something that's a PITA in the metric world. In addition, the canonical subdivision of the inch into powers of 2 (1/2, 1/4, 1/8...) is convenient as well.

Regarding your point about doing without metric, note that virtually all building materials come in imperial sizes. There is no need to know metric units in that environment.