Summary

  • In 1993 LATNET used low-cost 2 Mb/s spread-spectrum wireless LAN adapters to link two University of Latvia sites roughly five kilometres apart.
  • The link responded to poor telephone infrastructure; later accounts describe rooftop high-gain antennas and PC-based IP routing as part of the Latvian wireless approach.
  • This was an academic campus connection, distinct from LATNET’s separate 1992 RadioLink and from the network’s later expansion to more than 200 sites.

The useful story in Latvia’s early Internet history is not simply that radio replaced a cable. It is that LATNET took equipment built for a local wireless LAN and asked it to solve a harder, specific problem: how to join two university sites across Riga when telephone infrastructure was unreliable.

John Tully and Arnis Riekstins later described a 1993 link of about five kilometres between a remote University of Latvia campus and a central building. They reported low-cost 2 Mb/s spread-spectrum wireless LAN PC adapters and called it the university’s first citywide wireless LAN Internet-access link. That phrase belongs to the authors. It does not mean that all Riga households had wireless Internet, or that the link by itself covered the city.

The design was an act of adaptation. A wireless LAN adapter was not originally a city network. Later accounts of the Latvian deployments describe replacing standard antennas with higher-gain rooftop antennas and using a PC with IP routing software, including JNOS, to pass traffic between sites. Those details explain the technique, but the available record does not specify every component fitted to the first five-kilometre link.

Radio also brought a regulatory question. “Licence-free” was not a universal property of the equipment: the 1999 account says spectrum used in the United States was not generally available across Europe, and describes a particular Latvian licensing arrangement. The exact channel used on the first link is not established here.

The timeline matters. LATNET’s institutional history separately identifies a 1992 RadioLink between the University of Latvia’s mathematics and computer-science institute and Riga Technical University. The five-kilometre University of Latvia campus link is a distinct 1993 project. And the later network of more than 200 sites describes subsequent growth, not the initial bridge.

For a small academic network, the consequential choice was to route around a weak local connection with equipment that was relatively accessible. The sources document the link and its later technical interpretation; they do not provide a 1993 traffic series, measured throughput, uptime or user count. Its significance lies in the engineering response, not in unrecorded claims about scale.

Sources