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WiFi 802.22 Can Cover 12,000 Square Miles
tekgoblin writes "IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles. The standard is actually for Wireless Regional Area Networks (or WRAN), which use the white spaces left in the TV frequency spectrum."
Someone's finally planning to plan to do something with the spectrum? We didn't downgrade ourselves to digital TV for nothing?
And I made that post using an experimental WRAN network that I just constructed.
It will never see widespread adoption because the unwashed masses will think it causes cancer.
12000 square miles is about the area of Maryland.
Cool! Frist psot!
I would have had first post but i was 61.9 miles away from the tower and lost connection to slashdot :(
Should I change the password and enable WPA?
Or allow my neighbors in a 12,000 sq mile radius to share my connection?
I like sharing, it seems neighborly.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Range in "square miles"? That's as silly as this.
By my calculations, you could cover the entire continental US with just under 250 of those base stations. Obviously real life factors would increase that number quite a lot, but that still doesn't seem like that many towers. I'm guessing it's probably not practical to put very many people on a single tower, so such a system would have to be fairly exclusive (probably expensive).
I read the internet for the articles.
The 12,000 square miles number is kind of useless when trying to figure out what kind of coverage you are really talking about. 61miles is pretty close to 12,000 square miles in a circle which unless they have done something weird with changing the laws of nature is what we are talking about.
12000 = pi r^2
3819.7186 ~= r^2
61.8039 ~= r
So, simple maths suggest that we're definitely not going to have reception if we're more than 62 miles away from the tower, and that doesn't take into account the curvature of the earth, the height of the tower, atmospheric distortions, etc.
but it does suggest the standard would allow for decent reception within a 30 mile radius. That ain't too bad.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
..or else 100,000 people will bog down your bandwidth.
Seriously, though, the range must be somewhere around 62 miles ( since (Radius^2)*Pi = 12,000 square miles, then Radius = 61.8 miles ).
12,000 square miles
12000 square miles is not very impressive from a purely RF perspective. In fact, its not even trying very hard.
A=pi*r**2 thats sqrt(12000/3) thats sqrt(4000) thats a bit more than 60, since 60**2 = 3600.
So estimated in my head they're saying a 60 mile radius. BFD.
Now 60 miles at "digital TV" spectrum freqs and bandwidth with less than a couple kilowatts out to a 500 foot tower, now that would be impressive.
Or a battery life that does not require tethering the device to a 440V 3-phase AC supply rather than being "wireless".
I'm curious how they're working around that "obvious" physical limitation.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Distance isn't the only problem with wireless. Bandwidth is an issue (couldn't find how much the specification can handle, theoretical - overhead - inefficiencies) since bandwidth is shared among all users within that same distance unless it was point to point communication which isn't practical for the isp transmitter having to serve many random people.
On the other hand, rural areas with low density and large distances would benefit since it seem likely that such a system would be cheaper then installing cables.
This will be GREAT for the wireless mesh people who want to get away from the mess of the internet and communicate without fear of the big bad media companies spying on their every move.
Of course, yes, we all know the bad side of archaic, no-censorship networks (child porn, terrorism, etc.), but you just have to deal with that.
The creators of the products to mesh technologies probably should work together with encryption and sandboxing companies to create an ecnrypted sandbox so that people don't have their lives destroyed because of a thumbnail that someone ELSE uploaded, or at least advise people on products they can use.
No doubt the governments will try suppress such things by making it illegal to run a WRAN without a licence or some shit.
Roughly? Close enough...
From this article, and others like it, it seems as if white spaces spectrum will improve communication across the U.S., making weak signals and dropped calls a thing of the past. http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/How-Enterprise-Mobile-Communications-Can-Benefit-from-White/ba-p/131 Here's hoping for widespread adoption.
IEEE has just announced a new Wireless standard, 802.22, that can cover up to 12,000 square miles.
But if just ONE person turns on a microwave...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Guys, don't get your hopes up for an ISP-bucking peer to peer revolution in network topology. We're still gonna have a top down hierarchy and centralized control.
The IEEE, together with the FCC, is pursuing a centralized approach for available spectrum discovery. Specifically each Base Station (BS) would be armed with a GPS receiver which would allow its position to be reported. This information would be sent back to centralized servers (in the USA these would be managed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)), which would respond with the information about available free TV channels and guard bands in the area of the BS.
Not everyone is a super geology expert, ok?
Do not place 802.22 netbook on lap...
goes bye-bye. No reason to use it (or pay for it) when I can just connect to Joe Bob's unencrypted home network across town while sitting at starbucks without a sign-in.
In debates about Christianity, there are two groups: those looking for answers, and those looking to just ask questions.
are really fucked now.
This news is most welcome! It has the potential to level the ISP playing field again and harkin back to the times when mom and pop ISPs existed. How? Small start-up ISPs can now offer competing broadband to the likes of AT&T and offer the service at an unlimited tier. Thus, AT&T will be forced to remove its service caps. Companies will be able to build their own MAN's without having to pay Verizon/AT&T/CenturyLink leases for the lines. I will be following this with some excitement especially because I would love to run my own small ISP.
My understanding is that this specification is for regional wifi only, and not actually a consumer-level specification.
So no... this does not mean that your home wifi can suddenly be accessible to you from almost anywhere in the same city.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
From the wikipedia link: "By using just one TV channel (a TV channel has a bandwidth of 6 MHz; in some countries they can be of 7 or 8 MHz) the approximate maximum bit rate is 19 Mbit/s at a 30 km distance."
Think of the numer of potential users in a 100km radius. Even if they used a hundred channels, that's still not enough.
nt
This has potential to dramatically improve US internet access. In China, they have been able to completely ignore the pain that the US had in wiring the entire country with telephones because they can just stick up one tower and give an entire remote village cell phone service. This allowed China to get the entire country phone service in a matter of decade (not decades). It'd be great if the US could do something similar with broadband internet.
VHF? or UHF? a new way to connect to your local Internet Service Provider wirelessly sure sounds like a good idea and will give DSL & CableTV/Internet broadband some needed competition keeping the price down a little (i hope)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
22 Mbps per channel ... and each channel covers 12,000 square miles. That's about 1.8 Kbps per square mile.
Assume a population density of 21 people per square mile (Iowa's rural population from 2000, see http://www.demographia.com/db-usa-staterural.htm), works out to about 87 bps per person.
Figure that there are 5 people per household, so about 430 bps per household per channel. If there are roughly 80 available whitespace channels, then this works out to about 35 Kbps for each family.
Which is to say, it's roughly competitive with old fashioned dial-up service over a modem - V,34.
Clearly, this is not a panacea for rural Internet. It's a point-to-point system, similar to the wifi in your home.
A home wireless router might have a long range if there are no neighbors. But if there are twenty nearby wireless routers, channels 1, 5, and 9 get clogged up ... and then your wireless router can't reach beyond fifty feet.
a 62 mile radius is about as far as you can go from an earth bound antenna, provided that there are no hills in the way. This will work well in flat places like Kansas, and eastern North dakota / west central minnesota. but not so effective if there are real hills and mountains in the way.
Of course the Tea Party may force congress to pass a law making the earth flat, which could fix the problem of hills and stuff.
They could also change the radius by making PI = 3 as it says in the Bible.
Blimps/Aero-Sattelites hovering at around 40,000 ft that gets them above a lot of the atmosphere and a lot of the weather.
At that height the output of solar panels goes up compared to ground based solar, because there is a lot less atmosphere absorbing the energy before it gets to the panel.
The solar power could be used for the repeaters, antennas, eletric propellors for station keeping, etc.
And systems like these could be deployed over a disaster site like Haiti very quickly to network emergency responders and other aid organizations.
Republicans in Congress are proposing to eliminate unlicensed use of the new white space spectrum. That is, they'll require that the spectrum be sold to a entity willing to pay a market-competitive price - meaning the spectrum will have to produce a profit for one entity rather than producing value for everyone.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/republican-spectrum-bill-reins-in-wireless-free-riders-like-google.ars
Call your Congressional reps and tell them unlicensed wireless can produce much more value for our society, and should be expanded rather than ceding more control to the existing wireless monopolies.
Coverage is so big. Then there will be way too many users under 1 base station. The slice of bandwidth per user will be very small. We already have this problem for 3G network in downtown area. Now with uncoordinated use of spectrum in this WRAN and bigger cell size, the bandwidth per user will be much lower. What is the use case for this WRAN WiFi?
The coverage is very big. It is gone to be way too many users under 1 base station. The slice of bandwidth that an user can get will be extremely small. The 3G network in the downtown area has been experiencing the same problem. Now with uncoordinated use of spectrum in WRAN Wifi and much larger cell size, the bandwidth per user will be just much lower. In this case, the data rate may be high enough for us to send email only? What is the use?
When WiMax first came about, all my acquaintances that owned small ISPs bragged that WiMax could cover an entire metro area with a single tower.
To date, all WiMax installations I've seen use no more than 2Km range for antennas. Less than typical 3g installations.
I see this more useful in one way delivery of information. TV/Multimedia/on-demand content, not traditional two-way wireless communication.
Ha ha, what is a 12,000 sq mile radius?
A = pi*r^2
r = sqrt(A/pi)
r = sqrt(12000/3.1415...)
r = 61.8
With radius you're limited by the curved arc, but square covers the corners too! Think of the tangents!
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
remember "Rabbit Ears" or rooftop antenna's.
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. We have this huge thing called Sutro tower the Official Page of the tower is the corporate site and this Public page will give you a huge amount of information on the tower and its history.
This thing is almost 1000 feet tall and sits on the top of a Mt. Sutro and is direct line of site for most of the SF Bay Area and it packs a huge amount of RF power. The problem is that when you get behind a low lying hill the VHF TV band ( 87.5-87.9 MHz ) has shadowing problems just like FM radio which operates at 88 to 108 MHZ ( nominal ). I listen to my local PBS FM station in my car almost all the time. There are lots of places where moving the car +/- 5 feet dramatically effects reception of QKED 88.5 MHZ and it is an analog FM signal! The digital signals that are transmitted are line of sight or GTFO!
Also many many responders here seem to forget that Wi-Fi is a two way street! Just how big is your Wi-Fi unit going to be? Anything other then a home base station is forget about it. Evin with a home base station it will have to be a repeater, since you will still want your laptop / cell phone / i[whatever] / Android thingy to be able to use it and then what frequencies will you use? The entire reason that VHF is SO desirable is that it goes through walls, unlike these GHZ units that we have now where you get more then about 1 standard 2x4 framed Sheetrock wall between you and the unit and your signal drops to zilch since 100 mw only goes so far.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
It'd be nice if Science and Tech related websites would use the freaking METRIC system!!!
How is easier to use yards, miles, feet (WTF?), inches, than to say Mili-meter, centi-meter, deca-meter, kilo-meter, etc...?
I know this subject rapidly decays into a childish nationalist dick-waving, if only we could use some common sense...
And I WRAN
I WRAN so far away
I just WRAN
I WRAN all night and day
I couldn't get away
So we need like 1 AP for the entire continental US?
A school, where students with laptops, netbooks, ipads, etc, can now move from classroom to classroom, and not lose connectivity. That is fantastic.
And presumably the installation in a school building would not exceed the school's budget.
This looks like a good solution for people who are on the move, but within a city - like travelling from home to work and online in the car (assuming they're not the driver). Right now, one would have to use something like a 3G wireless modem, or something along those lines to connect while one is travelling. That should only be necessary if one is travelling to another city, or on a real long distance drive (like from Santa Clara to Tahoe).
Otherwise, something like this looks ideal. Wonder whether it'll need to use technologies like Mobile IP, so that connections ain't snapped while one is moving around in that vicinity. Theoretically, as long as one is within that radius, that shouldn't happen, but while travelling, if one is getting a better signal from another nearby tower, that could be properly utilized using Mobile IP to access the original network that that mobile node is a part of.
Hopefully, they use IPv6 w/ this from the get-go, so that there are no migration issues, and no address limitations, NATs or anything like it.
This runs upto 20Mb/s; shared; less for long range. It's not for you.
If you want to give your subscribers 8Mb/s down and 0.8Mb/s upload at say 50:1 contention ratio that's "20000000 *50 / (1.1 * 8000000)", my calculator says 113 users, over a 62 mile radius.
It can handle 25 uploading at full speed (no problem) but only TWO downloading at full speed. BIG problem; you'd have to make sure you have a good router at the head that can share the bandwidth between customers not just TCP sessions. On a variable bandwidth connection too ... interesting times.
This bandwidth seems to be per former TV channel so you'll be able to multiply this up by however many TV channels you can use; as I recall that was only five or six within a given area because of interference from other transmitters. But it's better "out in the sticks".
So it looks like it's okay for getting some sort of internet connection to a house ten miles down a dirt track; but not much else at the ISP level.
As for mesh networking. One of the problems with broadcast is chattering network adaptors. One of the design criteria for this seem to be to maximise peak node to node bandwidth available. This means that a single chattering node will take out a substantial percentage of the available bandwidth perhaps all of it. As someone who has had to hunt down such an ethernet card back in the bad old days I truly pity anyone tasked with this job over a 12000sqmile area.
At frequencies less than 1 Ghz the waves are far, far more easily absorbed by water and rain... it will not have the "fidelity" of wi-fi g
Another wireless technology for the mobile telcos to play with. How long do y'all think before they offer it to us, and would it supplant WiMax or not? Could we be talking 5G here?
disclaimer: i cannot guarantee any of these numbers are right
12000 = Pi * r^2
3819.718634205 = r^2
61.803872324 = r
61.803872324 mile radius and 123.607744648 mile diameter
earth has approximately a 24901.55 mile circumference (assuming a perfect sphere)
61.803872324 / 24901.55 = 0.002481929 (distance of circumference to cover)
0.002481929 * 360 = 0.89349444 (degrees to cover)
0.89349444 / 2 = 0.44674722 (theta)
exterior secant (height of antenna) = sec(0.44674722) - 1
sec(0.44674722) - 1 = 0.108823014 (miles high)
0.108823014 * 5280 = 574.58551392 (feet high)
you need to put up an antenna on a tower 575 feet high to get a direct line of sight to all you connections within 124 miles, assuming no really tall obstructions.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Waiting for the Automobile version.... WRAN-CAR.