Wireless Internet Goes on the Road By Seema Singh, Contributing Editor http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/sep02/wireless.html
Databus concept from India�s Media Lab Asia is an actual bus 1 September 2002�For years, authorities in developing countries have sought to bring the Internet to remote locations. Now, Indian engineers with the recently established Media Lab Asia (MLAsia) are preparing to install wireless Internet transceivers on buses crisscrossing rural India, a project that will provide villagers with connectivity. Called PostNet, it is built around the so-called Wi-Fi wireless broadband Internet standard (IEEE 802.11b). The idea is to ensure service, analogous to the postal system�s, at least a few times a day at a nominal cost. MLAsia (Mumbai) is a joint venture between the Indian government and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT; Cambridge), <snip> What MLAsia hopes to do is bring a proprietary wireless mesh routing technology currently being developed at the MIT Media Lab to India. It�s a low-cost, low-power networking technology that allows devices to talk to each other wirelessly. <snip> A bus-mounted databus MLAsia proposes to mass-produce inexpensive radio transceivers, at about US $100 each, and place them on inter-village buses. These transceivers, installed on the roof, will run on batteries already in the bus and will have a reach of up to about 1000 meters. Signals will travel from bus to bus until they reach a base station that connects to the Internet. Using these traveling transceivers, Internet service providers in urban areas will be able to extend services to rural people without any extra investment. People will be able to get the radio signal through their devices whenever the "connection bus" is in the vicinity. By spending $5 million�$10 million, "we can take broadband to every village in the country in about a year or two,"... <snip> One of the challenges facing MLAsia researchers is the arduous task of remodeling all the applications that will run on the devices. The goal is to make sure the applications function both in connected and disconnected modes and are able to exchange data seamlessly whenever the broadband connection is available. <snip> -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
