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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?
It will never see widespread adoption because the unwashed masses will think it causes cancer.
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.
It's easier to think of this in terms of linear distance between transmitter and receiver. If you do the math, this gives you a radius of about 62 miles.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Can we get some help from the EFF so that we don't get sued by the big telcos?
I'll ask for help from my math-betters "how many of these routers does it take to cover 90% of the country with 90% coverage" (aka keep the averages down by skipping the giant national parks out west etc.)
Can we get someone like on a T3 (or whatever) to host a rack of these and tell those phone companies to take their data caps and shove it?
Thoughts?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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.
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..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
That's suspiciously close to exactly 100km - could that 12,000 square mile figure have been derived from a metric back-of-the-envelope figure of "about 100km"?
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
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.
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.
No, that's not even roughly correct. It would be a circle with a diameter of about 124 miles.
Does radio care which standard of measurement is used?
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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'
If you do some other math, that's about two miles wide by 12,500 miles long; enough to reach around the world! :)
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
nt
It depends on what shape this volume is. Imagine if you were on Diskworld, and BSJ designed it to be just 1 inch wide, to go with his fish pond.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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.
Does radio care which standard of measurement is used?
Depends on if you are transmitting to a Mars probe.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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
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.
No, that's not even roughly correct. It would be a circle with a diameter of about 124 miles.
Which is also incorrect, it's about 61.8 miles.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
No, that's not even roughly correct. It would be a circle with a diameter of about 124 miles.
Which is also incorrect, it's about 61.8 miles [google.com].
Uh, of course a diameter of 124 miles is correct, I mixed up radius and diameter for a second there :)
Sorry.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
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.
Stop being such a stone-head. Jeez!
If we can't fix it, we'll fix it so nobody else can!
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.
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?
You forgot to tick the Post Anonymously checkbox.
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Stop drooling over your 'stick it to the telco' thoughts, and actually think for a moment. The stated bandwidth of this is 22Mbps per WRAN (not per user, per WRAN). The population of New York State (averaged) is 411 people/sq mi. So in the 12000sq mi area a tower covers you have almost 5 million people (on average). So each person can have a whopping 4 BITS per second of bandwidth. Even if you covered on 1 sq mi per tower (a huge expense) your would still be sharing 22Mbps with 410 other people. Of course, the actual density in NYC is more like 30000 people/sq mi.
The only place this makes sense is where the population has very low density, which are places that currently have no coverage at all. Just like TFA says.
Only for sufficiently large values of 62.
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.
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 matters that the measure may only be one significant digit while the converted value makes it appear to be two significant digits.
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.
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.