Long Range WiFi

Introduction

Since the development of the Wi-Fi radio standard, great leaps in the technology's abilities have been made. In one area, range, Wi-Fi has been pushed to an extreme, and both commercial and residential applications of this Long Range Wi-Fi have cropped up around the world. It has also been used in experimental trials in the developing world to link communities separated by difficult geography with little or no connectivity options. Instead of expensive cellular networks, microwave or satellite links, Long Range Wi-Fi is used for low-cost, unregulated point-to-point connections.

Applications

Business

1.provide coverage to a large office or business complex or campus.

2.Establish Point to point link between large skyscrapers or other office buildings.

3.Bring Internet to remote construction sites or research labs.

Residential

1.Bring internet to a home if regular cable cannot be hooked up at the location.

2.Bring internet to a vacation home or cottage on a remote mountain or on a lake.

3.Bring internet to a Yacht or Large sea-faring vessel.

4.share a neighborhood Wi-Fi network.

Companies providing Long Range WiFi kits

Probably the most well-known company that manufactures these kits is RadioLabs. Based out of Colorado, radiolabs offers a variety of pre-designed kits, or allows one to buy all the necessary components to make their own setup.

Increasing range in other ways

802.11N (Mimo)

802.11N is a feature that now comes standard in many routers, this technology works by using multiple antennas to target one or more sources to increase speed. But in tests, the speed increase was said to only occur over short distances rather than the long range needed for most point to point setups.

Power increase

Another way of adding range to your Wi-Fi network is by hooking a power amplifier into your existing antenna. Commonly known as "range extender amplifiers" these small devices add usually around ½ watt of power to the antenna these amplifiers have been tested to give more than 5x the range to your existing network. In the Case of the Popular Linksys WRT54G The RadioLabs 2.4 GHZ range extender amplifier increases the stock power of the WRT54G from 18Db to 38Db an increase of power by 211%. These power amplifiers offer a cheap, minimal setup that can easily be added to any existing network.

High-gain antennas and protocol hacking

Specially-shaped antennas can be used to increase the range of a WiFi transmission without having to drastically increase transmission power. Parabolic high-gain antennas allow transmitting over distances of several kilometers. The standard 802.11 protocol stacks can also be modified to make them more suitable for long distance, point-to-point usage, at the risk of breaking interoperability with other WiFi devices and suffering interference from transmitters located near the antenna.

Enemies of Long range Wi-Fi

Because of the range that is stretched out of a Wi-Fi connection with a long range setup, the connection sometimes becomes fragile and volatile. This allows mundane things to be a problem for these connections; the following are a few.

The world Record for Wi-Fi Range

Microserv Computer Technologies, based in Idaho Falls, and Trango Broadband Wireless, a fixed-wireless broadband equipment maker, on August 14, 2005 set the record for the longest Wi-Fi transmission at 137.2 miles Using gear from Trango, Microserv established the wireless link between two mountaintops in Idaho using the 2.4GHz and 5.8 Ghz wireless spectrum. The link was able to transmit an FTP file transfer at the rate of 2.3 megabits per second. The equipment used was not based on standard 802.11 wireless technology, but was new experimental technology from Trango. The companies used external PacWireless 2-foot dishes to transmit the radio signals.