125-Mile WiFi Connection

Jason Striegel writes "Team iFibre Redwire smashed the WiFi distance record, successfully linking a distance of over 125 miles at this year's DefCon WiFi Shootout. They maintained a full 11Mbit unamplified connection for 3 hours using Z-com 300mw PCMCIA cards, surplus satellite dishes, Linux, and a great deal of hacker ingenuity. The best part: yesterday afternoon they said that they expect this rig would work at distances of over 300 miles. Here's additional team info, a couple pictures of one of their rigs, and some more technical details." I still wish I could find truly out-of-the-box Linux-friendly USB adapters, so I could get some tiny fraction of this distance, cheap.

Comments

Working at 300 miles?

[MichaelSmith]

How are they going to wrap their wifi signal around the Earth, assuming that they don't have their own satellite?

I don't think ionospheric propogation is going to work at wifi frequencies. And you won't get 11 Mb/s at 27Mhz.

The death of land lines?

[tulsadano]

So a single WiFi point atop a city's tallest building could provide the entire metro region with high speed wireless internet access (hswia)? If this feat can be reliably duplicated, even at a relatively high cost it will lead to a revolution. With just a hundred or so hardware modules 80%+ of the US's pop would have free hswia! It could be the highest impact innovation since the explosion of the internet itself. Certainly it would overshadow the rise of residential broadband access. All those cable and phone companies would have to get out of the data business (since it would be free) and get back to the cable and phone businesses.

Re:Good for Cuba?

[MichaelSmith]

but every bit helps when you're living under a government such as that.

Actually its a fantastic idea. I always thought it should have been tried in Iraq: flood the population with free communication from outside and wait for change to start from within.

Perhaps the wifi links could be supported with covert donations of old PCs running free software, with cryto built in so that it is hard to track usage at the Cuban end.