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"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all. How do we define this lively darting about with words, of hitting them back and forth, this sort of brief smile of ideas which should be conversation?" Guy de Maupassant

Monday, December 8, 2003

Internet on wheels - extending reach through roadways

Economist.com has an article - Internet, on wheels - which points to a number of projects that are exploiting existing road networks to provide internet services. [link via iWire]

And its happening in India too :

"In India, the government plans to create 30 Bookmobiles of its own, two of which are already on the road. Egypt's Library of Alexandria has outfitted one. And in October, Mr Kahle's Anywhere Books project launched an Internet Bookmobile in Uganda, with the help of funding from the World Bank.

..... But perhaps the cleverest plan to put the internet on wheels comes from India. At ìThe Future in Reviewî, a wide-ranging technology conference held in San Diego earlier this year, Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute, an environmental think-tank, outlined a cunning scheme to provide e-mail access in rural India using buses. Each bus would be equipped with an e-mail server and a high-power Wi-Fi base-station, with a range of a mile or so. This communicates with nearby computers in homes, schools, offices or post offices, delivering and collecting e-mail wirelessly as the bus drives past, so that there are a handful of deliveries and collections each day. The buses connect to the internet when they reach the depot at the end of the line. Given the reach of the bus network, it is estimated that this approach could provide national e-mail coverage for a paltry $15m. E-mail by busówhy not? "

Whyever not !  Now the government has to bite.



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