I vaguely remember some sort of stunt where they had got hold of two 3 meter dishes paired them with off the shelf wifi radios, mounted one on a pickup truck and drove out across a dry lake bed. 53 miles before signal loss is what I remember.

I will probably never be able to find the source, and my poor memory probably inflated the range like any good fish story.

Not about range, but speed. Wifi is surprisingly slow. I noticed downloading a model from the internet (Huggingface) to my Desktop (connected by LAN cable) is faster than copying it from said Desktop to the laptop in the same room via Wifi.

I’m pretty sure I’ve connected to a bog-standard Mikrotik Metal over a thousand feet. The surprise wasn’t that it connected, it was that the phone could transmit back.

They address that they were looking at the maximum unlicensed power.

In HAM circles some people do use WiFi in an arguably legal manner by making the SSID their callsign and either making the network open or putting the password somewhere public. This is because you are not allowed to use public bands for encrypted communications (with a carveout for satellite control, for obvious reasons).

I'm unsure what ranges can be hit with that setup, but I know it can be far enough that LoS due to curvature of the earth becomes a factor.

I do think just getting a wireless P2P bridge is easier and smarter and why this hasn't seen more use.

I am still reminded of early WiFi and ways to extend it with Cantenna or foil backed contraptions made out of cardboard.