prostoalex's Journal: Intel sends Wi-Fi tens of miles away

MIT Technology Review describes a new Wi-Fi router from Intel capable of sending Wi-Fi signal at tens of miles away with somewhat decent 6 Mbps performance, which makes it perfect for rural Internet-less areas, and a number of countries interested in developing their Internet infrastructure, but no means to lay expensive cable or fiberoptics. The cost is roughly $500, and you need two such routers to create a point-to-point connection, Intel says: "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."