Researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has set what appears to be a new record for the longest communication link with Wi-Fi.
Pietrosemoli, president of the Escuela Latinoamerica de Redes (which means networking school of Latin America) established a WiFi link between two computers located in El Aguila and Platillon Mountain, Venezuela. That's a distance of 382 kilometres. He used technology from Intel, which is concocting its own long-range Wi-Fi equipment and some off-the-shelf parts. Pietrosemoli gets about 3 megabits per second in each direction on his long range connections.
Most WiFi signals only go a few meters before petering out. Conventional WiFi transmitters, however, transmit signals in all directions. By directing the signal to a specific point, range can be increased.
Honing the signal, however, means that the receiver and transmitter have to be aligned. Trees, buildings and other objects that get between them can sever the link. The curvature of the earth, mis-alignment between the transmitter and receiver, as well as shaking and any sort of movement at the transmitting or receiving end can also impair the signal. (To ameliorate some of these factors, Intel has created a way to electrically steer the signal, which in turn increases bandwidth.)
Geography was on Pietrosemoli's side. El Aguila and Platillon Mountain sit in the Andes, which form fairly jagged peaks in this part of the range. More details can be found in an article at the web site for The Association for Progressive Communcations.
The old record was 310 kilometres. Swedish scientists made a link between a balloon and an earth-bound station.
Intel along with organisations like Inveneo, a company that is trying to bring PCs to emerging markets, are testing the feasibility of long-range Wi-Fi as a communication link in Uganda and other emerging nations. Long-range W-iFi isn't as robust at WiMax, but the towers cost a lot less. Some hobbyists have done long range Wi-Fi, but with low bandwidth.
There are experiments going on in the U.S. as well. A long-range WiFi link connects Intel's Berkeley lab and a lab in Sun Microsystems on the Peninsula more than twenty miles away on the Peninsula.
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