It would take more than just "a few extra modulation and coding modes". At 0.3 kbps, even a single 100-byte packet would already use up one whole third of the available airtime for the channel. (On the current slowest WiFi speed of 1 Mb/s, that packet takes a fraction of a percent of the available airtime, and even that's slow enough that some newer APs disable the older 802.11b speeds by default and set the slowest speed to 6 Mb/s.) And due to how the WiFi protocol works, each AP periodically (usually every 100/1024 seconds, so around 10 times per second) broadcasts a beacon at the slowest rate it accepts (and AFAIK the beacon is nowadays larger than 100 bytes).
It would probably require at least changing how the clear channel assessment works, to allow for overlapping transmissions, but that's a fundamental part of the standard. Once you're going that far, it probably makes more sense to define a new protocol, one better tuned for that use case.
This is also disregarding that "a few extra modulation schemes" is costly to implement. Narrow band schemes (like GMSK) are incompatible with wide band protocols like LoRa or WiFi with spread spectrum/chipping or OFDM. (at least if you are interested in the same performance to price ballpark) Of course many things nowadays use digital baseband so it's in theory flexible, but the front end is still a major limiting factor, unless you use many-GHz RFADC/DAC which still suffer from wide vs narrow band problems.
Also, most long range protocols are meant for ultra low power applications like smart-ag or energy harvesting which WiFi does not support.
Considering the existing amount of congestion with WiFi, if we want to increase range further, we'd likely need more chipping codes to fit in the same frequency allocation, which will increase the noise floor for everybody, thus reducing the range... etc
The whole thing could probably be implemented with only custom firmware (ie. no hardware changes). All modern GPS's do below-noise-floor reception of GPS signals entirely in software - this would be the same. You might want custom hardware to avoid the rather huge power costs of leaving the main high bandwidth receivers being turned on the whole time though!
You could use the same MIMO mechanisms to get a better channel gain and increase the total amount of data users can transfer in a given city-sized area.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah
[2]: https://www.silextechnology.com/connectivity-solutions/wifi-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=motorola+canopy&sort=byDate&ty...
> From what I'm gathering, Canopy can be deployed over unlicensed frequencies (2.4 and 5 Ghz), allows for hundreds of subscribers connecting to a single Access Point, can provide up bandwidth in the 5-10 Mbps range, etc.
Better connect to something else nearer to you, making a fairer use of the available radio spectrum, or if you absolutely need to connect to your own equipment, switch to a protocol more suited for such needs, like LoRa or even a custom-purpose version of Wi-Fi called HaLow (aka .11ah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ah)
I should be able to walk 5 miles from my house, and still have my house wifi work, but at a data rate of 0.3 kbps.
I should never have wifi 'cutting in and out' or 'on the edge of the range' - it should be a simple matter of not being fast enough if I'm too far away. If Shannon[1] allows it, the standard should allow it too.
Obviously my phone would probably choose to switch to mobile data long before that. But for some use cases, like instant messaging, 0.3 kbps is fine, and there shouldn't be a need to use a totally different standard to achieve it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theore...