The Blog of Harald

Earlier this week I linked to a story about a 72 mile WLAN link run by SDSC. There’s been an update (the quote is from Edupage):

POWER REDUCED ON WLAN LINK

A story in Computerworld prompted complaints that the High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN) was operating an illegal configuration on its 72-mile WLAN link between the San Diego Supercomputer Center and San Clemente Island. In response, HPWREN reduced a power amplifier it uses from 1 watt to 250 milliwatts to stay within Federal Communications Commission regulations for power levels on the 2.4-GHz band. HPWREN principal investigator Hans Werner-Braun said any violation of the power limits was unintentional. Data throughput has dropped to about 300 kilobits per second, but the link has been maintained at the reduced power level.

That was a minor oops. I guess there is such thing as “bad press”…