Intel Wi-Fi Provides 6 Mbps Over 100 km 77
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."
still too expensive (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
A lot of issues with this (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest issue is that 2.4, with only 3 non-overlaping channels, is it almost unusable for long distance shots. I'm working in a WISP that has some 2.4 and it will make you pull your hair out. At one tower, in somewhat of a rural area, we could see 121 different SSIDs from an omni antenna a couple of hundred feet off the ground.
At 500.00 a unit, I doubt this will see high deployment, but if all of these things don't play nice with each other, it will be yet more interference.
And last, 2.4 could already do ten miles easy already, and much cheaper. You could build a Mikrotik AP for 600.00ish and have 20 clients at 10 miles for 200ish a client unit, if they are all line of sight. But note that you have stretched 2.4 well beyound what it was designed for, and in no time you will understand exactly why WISPs startup and fold like crazy...and the only people who made ANY money are the ones who sold you the equipment.
Transporter_ii
Single point failure. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Perfect..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I have done a little work on this problem over the years and I suspect there is just a lack of all the necessary pieces for a good high performance mesh network solution. Here are some ideas off the top of my head while ignoring economic and political reasons:
1. Current radio hardware and band allocations only support half-duplex communications. WiMax uses transmit and receive synchronization to lower the dead time and prevent collisions which helps but how do you synchronize an arbitrary number of half-duplex stations in a variable geometry environment without a significant loss of throughput?
2. How well does IP handle a constantly changing network topology with hidden nodes? I suspect overlaying IP onto a protocol specifically designed to handle routing in an adverse wireless environment would help. Every node should maintain an extensive situational awareness of its local routing environment to provide for instant failover and redundant routing.
3. QoS would require some type of sharing scheme that does not rely on the good intentions of every node. BitTorrent accomplishes this using Tit-for-Tat. IP accomplishes this by using flow control and assuming a largely benign network. While computationally expensive, I suspect some type of cryptography based token scheme would allow both trust metrics and something like a packet routing barter system. Notice that this automatically allows the client to assign priorities to different types of traffic while intermediate nodes can accept the client's word given enough trust.