Hacker Friendly

This past weekend, I helped to establish a 101 Km (62.7 mile) wireless link from Trieste to Piancavallo, Italy. This was part of my work at the 2007 ICTP school on wireless. The gory details of the shot are up on the wiki, but here is the executive summary:

• For the Trieste end of the link, we used a Berkeley TIER box with a Ubiquiti SR2 400mW 802.11g radio in AP mode.
• For the remote end, we used a matching TIER box for the first test, and a Metrix Mark II using the same SR2 radio for the second test.
• The best throughput we achieved was approximately 600 Kbps, as measured by iperf. We used video conferencing, VoIP, chat, email, and the web on the link.

We started a flickr group that has lots of pretty photos from the event.

While this isn’t a world distance record for terrestrial Wi-Fi, we believe it is a record for the longest Wi-Fi shot ever accomplished in Italy. It’s no coincidence that two of the members of our team (Carlo Fonda and Ermanno Pietrosemoli) were the engineers of the 279 Km link.
Update: Here is a Google Earth KMZ for the shot.