15-Mile Wi-Fi Shot At 4 Mbps Up and Down

DarnComputers writes "5G Wireless (FGWC) announced that it has documented a long distance Wi-Fi shot of 15 miles at a throughput of 4Mbps upload and download speed. The shot was completed this last weekend, in a competitive Wi-Fi shootout at the Defcon convention in Las Vegas, Nev. There were many participants with both commercial-grade and homemade entries in a variety of categories at Defcon's first annual Wi-Fi shootout.http://home.earthlink.net/~wifi-shootout/"

Only 15 miles?

[Brymouse]

That's a good shot, but I have done 10.1, 22.65 and 19.3 mile links, with 99.9% uptime. I used Breezecom DS.11 radios and 24 DBi andrew/conifer antennas to accomplish it. The worst signal strength was -68 to -72 dbm on the 19 mile shot.

It's not something that all that uncommon.

Legality?

[d-ude]

No matter what, at least it has to be more legal than the 'key-down showdown' stuff that used to be popular on the CB radios. I saw a guy with a suburban that had like 6 alternators on some custom bracketry, the entire rear cargo area full of batteries, and two large coil antennas on the roof. He claimed that he had a different length of coax on one antenna so that by the time the signal from the rear antenna 'slammed into' (his words) the front antenna would start transmitting and it helped his performance. They usually sit people many miles away and whomever can be heard the loudest wins. Everyone transmits at once I guess. Craziness.

Anyway i'm just wondering what the limits are for dB gain on a certain power level to keep within the legal limits. I have an Andrew 24dB gain dish for 2.4GHz and I wonder if I hooked it to my Lucent card if it would be a legal power level.

Friends and foes in a radius of 14.8951 miles

[armando_wall]

I'm looking forward to when this kind of technology becomes more mainstream (and cheap).

You will be able to "phone" your nearby friends (usually most of them) by using regular p2p netphone software and a Wi-Fi connection... why limiting to audio? Videomeeting software! Free-of-charge digital communications possible?

Goodbye to those ZIP and CD-Rs and DVD-Rs, now you can upload your work from your home pc directly to your office desktop (maybe companies will have to implement stronger security measures).

On the downside, I can see a new generation of viruses, trojans and worms "in the air".

only 15miles and 4mbps ? that's nothing

[RouterSlayer]

Way back in '99 when wi-fi was just coming out (barely), I setup a 19.2 mile shot and got 11 mbps out of it, with only 11ms ping time.

this isn't news... and it's not even useful...

btw that wi-fi setup I did is still running today!

and didn't we see some recent stories on slashdot of wi-fi setups running more than 30 miles with decent through-put ?

Re:Only 15 miles?

[rudeboy1]

The breezecom system you use is a specialized point-to-point/point-to-multipoint bridge system. They're designed to go that far. Your overall throughput is probably about 1-2 megs, right? These guys were using a home wi-fi system that is not designed to go more than a few hundred feet. Amplifying a signal like that takes a pretty good amount of thought, especially to get those kinds of throughput figures. Amplifying and transmitting a signal of that nature is like trying to stretch a 1X1 icon to the size of your screen. It comes out all poixelated and fuzzy. Same with this. Those chipsets were not designed to deal with those distances. The article doesn't say anything about lag time, which I would assume to be considerable. They did this in the middle of Vegas, right? I would hate to see the signal to noise ratio in that area. That would make it SO much more interesting.