Buses equipped with wi-fi are being used to deliver web content to remote rural villages in the developing world.
In rural India and parts of Rwanda, Cambodia and Paraguay, the vehicles offer web content to computers with no internet connection.
The buses and a fleet of motorcycles update their pages in cities before visiting the hard-to-reach communities. As well as offering popular pages, the United Villages project also allows users to request specific information.
A small box, with an antenna, onboard the buses and motorcycles communicates with the rural computers.
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In many parts of the developing world it is too expensive to lay the fibres and copper cable to deliver a standard internet connection. Wireless technologies also do not reach many remote places.
The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan said the company had been set up to give those people in these areas a slice of the web for a fee.
"There's only 0.003% percent of the web that rural India cares about," he told BBC News.
"They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."
The village computer was often in the local store, he added.
Every time the wi-fi bus rolled by the village - up to six times a day - the pages were updated, he said.
Full story at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6506193.stm
(Lead for this story from Dewayne Hendricks posting to the Dewayne-net mailing list.)
