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Intel Wi-Fi Provides 6 Mbps Over 100 km
MIT Technology Review describes a new Wi-Fi router from Intel capable of sending a Wi-Fi signal tens of miles with 6-Mbps performance. This is perfect for rural areas without Internet service, and for less developed countries interested in building out their Internet infrastructure but no means to lay expensive cable or fiber optics. The routers cost about $500 each, and you need two of them for a point-to-point connection. Quoting: "Intel's RCP platform rewrites the communication rules of Wi-Fi radios. Galinvosky explains that the software creates specific time slots in which each of the two radios listens and talks, so there's no extra data being sent confirming transmissions. 'We're not taking up all the bandwidth waiting for acknowledgments,' he says. Since there is an inherent trade-off between the amount of available bandwidth and the distance that a signal can travel, the more bandwidth is available, the farther a signal can travel."
When a pair of linksys routers, 2 old and free Dish network dishes and $30.00 worth of parts can to the exact same thing.
Even if they were available when I helped start a community wifi, we would not use them. they are too expensive. We are getting WRT54GL routers for $50.00 each, and tere is a never ending supply of free dish network dish assemblies with mounts.
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The problem with Canopy, as it is designed, is that the tower sites cost a fortune because the APs only have 60 degrees of coverage and, as designed, it would take 6 APs (900.00 to 1,500.00 each) to have 360 degree coverage. But it is possible to connectorize the APs and use far less APs by adding antennas with more coverage. If you can stomach that, you can get client units for less than 300.00. And add an aftermarket sync unit (200.00 - 300.00), and you can have multiple APs and clients not interfere with each other (just hope the other guy in town with Canopy syncs his equipment).
Let me tell you, two to three times, I have been involved in a 2.4 build-out. Each time it went like this. You spend a lot of time and money going around and swapping out that "expensive" Canopy equipment for the much cheaper 2.4 equipment. Everything works fine for about four days to a week. You run back and swap a few people back to that "expensive" Canopy equipment for various reasons...but within six months, when the crap hits the fan for some reason, and you have to have help scrambling to find enough Canopy equipment to put everyone back on...because its the only thing that "just works." It may not be perfect, but it does work.
After it saves your ass a few times, that Canopy equipment doesn't seem so expensive.
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This is poorly summed up, the point of this is not the range or the speed, its the fact that it only uses 6Watts firing data at that range and speed and could use stand alone, solar powered units to maintain data links.
Actually, bandwidth scales much better than this. I used to run 600~ Cable modems at 256Kbps on 4 T1s. That happens to work out to 6Mbit. Towards the end we were peaking often, but overall it worked ok. 400 Users at 200Kbps is reasonable in my experience. And 200Kbps is far better than dialup if it's your only choice. =)
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