Long-Distance Wi-Fi

Intel has announced plans to sell a specialised Wi-Fi platform later this year that can send data from a city to outlying rural areas tens of miles away, connecting sparsely populated villages to the Internet. The wireless technology, called the rural connectivity platform, will be helpful to computer-equipped students in poor countries, says Jeff Galinovsky, a senior platform manager at Intel. And the data rates are high enough — up to about 6.5 megabits per second — that the connection could be used for video conferencing and telemedicine