A few years back, I had a condo on Lake Washington (east of Seattle) and a buddy of mine is a microwave engineer and we were hanging out one day out on my deck with our laptops and he mentioned how amazing it was that there were so many WiFi signals and he said he had a 4 foot dish from a 2ghz MW link in the junk pile at work that they had replaced with a newer 11Ghz link. He went and got it and we put a USB WiFi dongle on the feed horn on a tripod and it was amazing, we could point it across the lake and get all these WiFi hot spots some were open. It just shows, a big antenna on one end really helps with the link budget, of course, the beam width is super narrow so it's pretty finiky on the positioning. I am not sure the distance exactly there but it had to be a mile or two.
In Australia, people are ripping out those old 11ghz tv dishes (when they remember they have them on thier roof still) now that the DVB-T free to air is somewhat decent in cities, and online streaming has taken off.
It’s not entirely unrealistic to get several and replace the LNB’s with Wifi adaptors, and set up multi diferectional internet spongeing setup.
Meanwhile I just installed three Ubiquiti APs in a ~64sqm (~700 sqft) apartment because fuck if reinforced concrete walls and thick doors are going to stand in the way of us having good WiFi coverage at home.
> Next, Paul et al. [62] reported on their observation of the WLAN link performance in open outdoor networks. The deault packet size was 1470 B for all reported measurement campaigns. They achieved a maximum range of 1800 m LOS at 148 Mbps with IEEE 802.11n links in outdoor locations for back-haul connection among WLAN APs.
I'm sure there are things here making the actual tech impressive, presumably biggest thing being power consumption and size. But just saying that the demo is not doing much when they don't provide any details of the setup.
For long distance terrestrial wireless communication on sub GHz wireless frequency, now people normally use Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions like LoRa, SigFox or ELTRES, but SigFox has been out of business, and ELTRES being Sony mainly limited to Japan at the moment. That leaves majority of the LPWAN installation based on LoRa.
LoRa however is not without its problem namely the spreading factor (SF) between 8 and 12 limitations, if you want to go further you really want to use the highest SF but the bandwidth goes down exponentially and instead of Kbps you have merely lowest bits/bytes speed transmission even with clear Line-of-Sight (LoS). We have tested LoRa transmission over the sea (island to mainland) and it even works for more than 20 km. That's OK if you have only IoT systems where the job is turning some remote switch or relay to be on or off.
There is a real need for efficient low power higher bandwidth transmission (Mbps range not Kbps) and this how HaLow by IEEE as inside this post come into the picture, and another cellular based Reduced Capability (RedCap) standardized in 5G release 17 standard by competing organization 3GPP. These new standards has more higher bandwidth than the existing LoRa and existing 4G/5G standards for examples NB-IoT and LTE-M but the facts the latter standards use existing 4G/5G infrastructure is a big plus and the latest RedCap standard want to capitalize on that.
With what antenna type? IoT-like use cases often don't lend themselves towards the usage of highly-directional, large antennas and high-power transmitters.
The gamechanger is that they're doing it with basically a handheld tablet.
Previous long-range WLAN deployments were pretty much limited to point-to-point fixed links using high-gain directional antennas. Being able to move around in arbitrary orientations opens up dozens of new use cases.
well at some point, long distance wifi is just a 4G/5G antenna
of course the protocol is not the same, but it's not very different either
4g/5g might also have techniques to improve connectivity in a 3km radius when you have buildings and so many other problematic things, while wifi was designed for building interiors.
I don't know how expensive is a cheap 5G antenna, but seems like it's a tech designed for longer distance, so why use wifi?
I'm not an expert in 5G, but I was under the impression that the antennas and protocol support far more advanced beamforming than is available to other wireless tech.
I remember reading somewhere that it has a lot on common with phased array radar systems.
> This paper demonstrates the use of Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII-3), 5.725-5.825GHz, Wi-Fi frequencies, in the IEEE802.11a/n standard ... A link distance of 24.3 kilometers, the longest so far, has been achieved. An average peak throughput of 98.4Mbps has been observed ... using a TDMA based Wi-Fi radio overcomes the fundamental challenges associated with the use of the off-the-shelf Wi-Fi radio whose Media access layer is based on CDMA/CA MAC protocol.
I think what we need is cheap 4G or 5G microcells. The difference between Wifi and 4G/5G is that 4G/5G requires lots of infrastructure to run.
Then need a non-profit provider. Let's anyone sign up and manage cells. It runs in the CBRS bands. It is open to anyone. Although, might be commercial opportunity to restrict access for businesses and households.
The big difference is that it operates in a license-exempt frequency band, at transmission powers orders of magnitude less than regular cellular networks. Anyone can deploy a wifi network for a few bucks; you have to invest many millions to roll out your own 5G network.
People tend to forget, that if you can transmit 3km away, all the signals from everyone in that 3km circles are being received by your device too. With 2.4ghz wifi in busy apartment buildings, all the channels are overcrowded already, there is some space left on 5ghz, but not a lot, so that's why we've been going higher in frquencies for more bandwidth.
We also have other systems for unlicenced long-range communications (eg. LoRa), but once that becomes (more) popular, the spectrum will be full of that too.
> everyone in that 3km circles are being received by your device too.
This could be pretty intense. Using the below tool I had a play and found that you could have about 1.1 million people within 3km of you when in Cairo.
Exactly, high absorption creates the localized cells each of which is typically limited in the number of (transmitting) devices. For something like this long range IoT cell to work you would want to create temporal cells or limit them to very low power. The problem is that those require agreement between devices (and noise sources) while simple absorption doesn't (treats everything equally).
Barely related, but reminded me that a recent comment here linked to this DEFCON talk from a former darknet vendor. He claimed to use WiFi from a house a mile away using a Yagi antenna
With the right directional antenna you can already go like 10 miles and more. I certainly went over 1 km like 17 years ago just by using a grid reflector antenna connected to a cheap consumer 802.11b access point using legal power and a normal PCMCIA card with no external antenna on the other side. The point of the technology should be to allow long range communications with some speed restrictions but without sacrificing portability, which of course using a big directional antenna is not possible.
Pringles can wifi hacking has been around since 2005ish. I also remember someone using a spider strainer as a cheap handheld dish with a USB stick wifi transceiver placed near the focus.
15+ years ago, my friend made a Yagi from a piece of wood and some nails, to connect to some open WiFi network from a block of flats a couple hundred meters away, in order to use it as a backup connection during semi-regular outages his ISP suffered from.
Ah, the joyful age of high school. No money or power to do things "the right way", but ample free time to skill up and hack your way around.
Vehicle to vehicle WiFi communication is standardised under the 802.11p and 802.11bd ammendments. They main difference between 11p and standard WiFi is they have halved the bit rate to increase the range and provide a way for vehicles to broadcast info outside a pre-established network context. 11bd builds on 11p adding more functionality. I don't remember the specifics of 11bd as at the time I was working with the technology 11bd hadn't finished standardisation yet.
11p and 11bd are more generally V2X comms of which there are a cellular variants (C-V2X and NR-V2X)
Unless you are far from civilization you can just use the cellular network and not need yet another radio. My Tesla gets real time updates for traffic congestion already, it's not much of a stretch to think that it could upload it's location to a server and receive relevant information concerning the surrounding vehicles through the existing channels.
Such a centralised system could also do some sanity checks. But in a peer to peer system how would one guard against malicious actors shouting false information?
Allied Media in Detroit is connecting wi-fi over long distances. They find say a church steeple to setup the base station. Then anyone who wants wi-fi they mount an antenna on their roof or balcony and point it at the steeple. I am not certain of the distances they get but I am sure it is at least a mile.
Here is an article on their project and they have published a book on the what they're building in Detroit. It is a charity that I personally support.
>Most people have probably experienced the frustration of weak Wi-Fi signals. Even getting a network to cover every corner of a fairly modest house can be a challenge
That's... not why your AP signal is weak.
It's because of laws that limit your broadcast strength.
From my experience with in-home WiFi most access points can cover a house just fine. The issue is even in the suburbs, you have dozens of other signals on the same frequency. So your signal to noise ratio is awful, leading to it being unusable in the spots farthest from the access point.
The allowed broadcast strength in the 2.4GHz band is so high that in a (sub)urban environment you won't just receive your own network, but also those of literally a dozen neighbors around you - and there are plenty of areas in your house where you can receive your neighbor's network better than your own so you end up in a shouting match.
And of course many people "solve" their poor wifi connection by adding a repeater or increasing the transmission power, which fixes the symptoms for them but makes the overall problem worse for everyone around them.
5Ghz has essentially solved the problem, simply because the signal gets killed real quick by things like walls - especially exterior ones. Your signal won't make it much beyond your house so you don't get in a shouting match with your neighbors, and adding a repeater (mostly) does what you'd expect it to.
If memory serves the early wrt54g replacement firmwares could go to around 2x the legal broadcast limit. I assume they still can.
Unlikely to be caught doing it, unless you live in the urban core. And for an apartment, a directional antenna likely would have sufficed for many uses, prior to MiMo ubiquity.
[+] [-] zw123456|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggsy|2 years ago|reply
It’s not entirely unrealistic to get several and replace the LNB’s with Wifi adaptors, and set up multi diferectional internet spongeing setup.
Of could it would look ridiculous.
[+] [-] 7373737373|2 years ago|reply
There is hardware advertised for 1Gbps for 100+km links!
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zokier|2 years ago|reply
Select example:
> Next, Paul et al. [62] reported on their observation of the WLAN link performance in open outdoor networks. The deault packet size was 1470 B for all reported measurement campaigns. They achieved a maximum range of 1800 m LOS at 148 Mbps with IEEE 802.11n links in outdoor locations for back-haul connection among WLAN APs.
I'm sure there are things here making the actual tech impressive, presumably biggest thing being power consumption and size. But just saying that the demo is not doing much when they don't provide any details of the setup.
[+] [-] teleforce|2 years ago|reply
Deploying License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks:
https://www.ciscopress.com/store/deploying-license-free-wire...
For long distance terrestrial wireless communication on sub GHz wireless frequency, now people normally use Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solutions like LoRa, SigFox or ELTRES, but SigFox has been out of business, and ELTRES being Sony mainly limited to Japan at the moment. That leaves majority of the LPWAN installation based on LoRa.
LoRa however is not without its problem namely the spreading factor (SF) between 8 and 12 limitations, if you want to go further you really want to use the highest SF but the bandwidth goes down exponentially and instead of Kbps you have merely lowest bits/bytes speed transmission even with clear Line-of-Sight (LoS). We have tested LoRa transmission over the sea (island to mainland) and it even works for more than 20 km. That's OK if you have only IoT systems where the job is turning some remote switch or relay to be on or off.
There is a real need for efficient low power higher bandwidth transmission (Mbps range not Kbps) and this how HaLow by IEEE as inside this post come into the picture, and another cellular based Reduced Capability (RedCap) standardized in 5G release 17 standard by competing organization 3GPP. These new standards has more higher bandwidth than the existing LoRa and existing 4G/5G standards for examples NB-IoT and LTE-M but the facts the latter standards use existing 4G/5G infrastructure is a big plus and the latest RedCap standard want to capitalize on that.
[+] [-] cyberax|2 years ago|reply
It's _omnidirectional_. You don't need to point it.
[+] [-] lxgr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crote|2 years ago|reply
Previous long-range WLAN deployments were pretty much limited to point-to-point fixed links using high-gain directional antennas. Being able to move around in arbitrary orientations opens up dozens of new use cases.
[+] [-] jokoon|2 years ago|reply
of course the protocol is not the same, but it's not very different either
4g/5g might also have techniques to improve connectivity in a 3km radius when you have buildings and so many other problematic things, while wifi was designed for building interiors.
I don't know how expensive is a cheap 5G antenna, but seems like it's a tech designed for longer distance, so why use wifi?
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeonik|2 years ago|reply
I remember reading somewhere that it has a lot on common with phased array radar systems.
Here is a Wikipedia link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna
What I can't square away is I also remember learning about beamforming in my Wireless engineering course, and I thought WiFi had some similar too.
But for some reason my brain is telling me 5G can beam really narrow "spotlights" of signal to the client devices.
Sorry for the vagueries but it's all I can recall.
[+] [-] transpute|2 years ago|reply
> This paper demonstrates the use of Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII-3), 5.725-5.825GHz, Wi-Fi frequencies, in the IEEE802.11a/n standard ... A link distance of 24.3 kilometers, the longest so far, has been achieved. An average peak throughput of 98.4Mbps has been observed ... using a TDMA based Wi-Fi radio overcomes the fundamental challenges associated with the use of the off-the-shelf Wi-Fi radio whose Media access layer is based on CDMA/CA MAC protocol.
2021, "Open-source private LTE and 5G networks", 600+ comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27946947
[+] [-] ianburrell|2 years ago|reply
Then need a non-profit provider. Let's anyone sign up and manage cells. It runs in the CBRS bands. It is open to anyone. Although, might be commercial opportunity to restrict access for businesses and households.
[+] [-] crote|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|2 years ago|reply
We also have other systems for unlicenced long-range communications (eg. LoRa), but once that becomes (more) popular, the spectrum will be full of that too.
[+] [-] lostlogin|2 years ago|reply
This could be pretty intense. Using the below tool I had a play and found that you could have about 1.1 million people within 3km of you when in Cairo.
https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/
[+] [-] kurthr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coffeebeqn|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nammi|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01oeaBb85Xc
[+] [-] squarefoot|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bb88|2 years ago|reply
https://www.instructables.com/Wifi-Signal-Strainer-WokFi/
At some point people were trying to set the record for the longest range wifi signal.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|2 years ago|reply
Ah, the joyful age of high school. No money or power to do things "the right way", but ample free time to skill up and hack your way around.
[+] [-] sidewndr46|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mjr_Mojo|2 years ago|reply
11p and 11bd are more generally V2X comms of which there are a cellular variants (C-V2X and NR-V2X)
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|2 years ago|reply
Such a centralised system could also do some sanity checks. But in a peer to peer system how would one guard against malicious actors shouting false information?
[+] [-] rmason|2 years ago|reply
Here is an article on their project and they have published a book on the what they're building in Detroit. It is a charity that I personally support.
https://medium.com/read-write-participate/connecting-the-unc...
[+] [-] boringuser2|2 years ago|reply
That's... not why your AP signal is weak.
It's because of laws that limit your broadcast strength.
[+] [-] sidewndr46|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crote|2 years ago|reply
The allowed broadcast strength in the 2.4GHz band is so high that in a (sub)urban environment you won't just receive your own network, but also those of literally a dozen neighbors around you - and there are plenty of areas in your house where you can receive your neighbor's network better than your own so you end up in a shouting match.
And of course many people "solve" their poor wifi connection by adding a repeater or increasing the transmission power, which fixes the symptoms for them but makes the overall problem worse for everyone around them.
5Ghz has essentially solved the problem, simply because the signal gets killed real quick by things like walls - especially exterior ones. Your signal won't make it much beyond your house so you don't get in a shouting match with your neighbors, and adding a repeater (mostly) does what you'd expect it to.
[+] [-] hinkley|2 years ago|reply
Unlikely to be caught doing it, unless you live in the urban core. And for an apartment, a directional antenna likely would have sufficed for many uses, prior to MiMo ubiquity.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] westurner|2 years ago|reply
[1] "Sensor-Free Soil Moisture Sensing Using LoRa Signals" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768950
[+] [-] westurner|2 years ago|reply
- Kreosan English's modded lunar rover WiFi antenna videos: "100s of km" https://youtu.be/Nk-nj_BwoBE?si=0iwpQBFs9ZqFP0p8 ... 10x: https://youtu.be/GWq6L94ImX8?si=V2R8hpa3vAosbhvi
[+] [-] minipark|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spacebacon|2 years ago|reply