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."

Perfect for regional australia

[awdau]

There are so many areas within range of regional cities that only have dialup.

Perfect.....

[rolfwind]

if you don't require privacy. Hopefully, they put in an extremely good encryption scheme with this and not one merely "good 'nough'. Still a good leap forward in many areas, our country is way behind as it is, and it has next to nothing to do with population density for the east and west coasts many areas of which has poor, overpriced service as well.

I often wondered what is stopping a mesh network from spreading. It would be basically the type which the OLPC has, except essentially a router with an antenna could be put on top of your house and connect with others of its type, from spreading. Of course, there would have to be a central hub connected into a fat pipe every so often so the signal doesn't hop around like mad.

Re:Perfect for regional australia

[CastrTroy]

Yes, but that's 6 mbps split between everybody who wants to use it. Let's say you have a small town with 400 computers. And lets say that 1/4 of them want to go online at the same time. So, we have 6 mbps / 100 users, and you have 60 kbps per user. Which ends up being not that much faster than your average dial-up service. Using wireless is like hooking everybody up to a single hub. The bandwidth gets shared between all the users. Works great when you have 4 people sharing a 10 mbit LAN connection to a 1 mbit internet connection, but not so well when you want hundreds of people on the same network.

Re:Perfect for regional australia

[rmadmin]

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. =)

They Never Heard of ZModem?

[Toad-san]

"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."

Doh .. Huge difference in the later early modem data transfer protocols was (1) variable packet size (if noise went up, packet size would drop down) and (most important): No ACK/NAK! Sender just sent as fast as its little chips could push the data out. Receiver would just receive and stuff the data away. It was only when the receiver did NOT get a good packet that it would do a NAK (and send the number of the bad / required packet). The sender would stop what it was doing, drop back to the bad packet number, and retransmit from there. (With more memory and speed, it would've been better to buffer packets so sender only had to send the single bad packet, and then could resume where it was further down the data stream. But I digress.)

So signal conditions are so lousy with wireless data transmit protocols that they're still doing ACK/NAK for every single steenking packet? That's pretty dumb, eh?

Toad-san