BBC news today:
Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.
A couple of months ago S. Keshav gave a talk about this topic at UCL. Have a look at the paper of his research group Lowcost Communication for Rural Internet Kiosks Using Mechanical Backhaul.
Rural kiosks in developing countries provide a variety of services such as birth, marriage, and death certificates, electricity bill collection, land records, email services, and consulting on medical and agricultural problems. Fundamental to a kiosk’s operation is its connection to the Internet. Network connectivity today is primarily provided by dialup telephone, although Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSAT) or long-distance wireless links are also being deployed. These solutions tend to be both expensive and failure prone. Instead, we propose the use of buses and cars as ‘mechanical backhaul’ devices to carry data to and from a village and an internet gateway…