First Mile Solutions: Cheap net access

Bring­ing Inter­net Access to third world coun­tries where it's too expen­sive to pull wire.

I was read­ing IEEE com­puter mag­a­zine (Jan­u­ary) and saw this arti­cle about a pretty cool project designed to bring inter­net access to the third world in places where it's too expen­sive to pull wire. The idea is clever, so I thought I'd share:

They put a wire­less access point in each vil­lage (with a Linux sys­tem), and they put a linux box with an access point and an antenna in vehi­cles that drive through the vil­lages (like a bus). The bus hard­ware is pow­ered by a UPS wired to the elec­tri­cal sys­tem. When the bus dri­ves through town, it auto­mat­i­cally exchanges data with the vil­lage. It's not real-time, but good enough for email and other basic things

Think uucp, but using cars instead of modems…