WiFi-enabled bicycles? Worth a try. Students at New York's Parsons School of Design came up with a novel method of spreading wireless networking to otherwise unconnected locations (such underground subway stations) by rigging up regular bikes with 802.11b access points set to route bits to adjacent bikes until one has a clear Internet signal. The system is still very rough -- it doesn't seem to work when the bikes are moving, and the battery life is pretty lousy -- but I was struck at the willingness of the design students to merge seemingly disparate technologies in order to achieve what they see as a social good (that is, free wireless for everyone).
This also suggests to me that a likely element of the already-arrived (but not yet well-distributed) future is the spread of peer-to-peer systems (technologies and behaviors) into our social and physical infrastructure -- into the very bones and marrow of our societies. "Make the invisible visible" is a good Viridian motto; maybe a good WorldChanging one is "make the networks ubiquitous."
Comments (3)
from http://www.smartmobs.com/archives/002252.html
Five motorcycle riders from Banlung {Wireless Quilts }
Posted by Jim_Downing at 02:28 PM
This article details innovative ICT projects from India,Vietnam,Malaysia,Thailand,and Cambodia that delegates heard about at the World Summit on the Information Society.It leads with the story of the daily routine of five motorcycle riders who leave Banlung in Cambodia to go to 13 rural villages to provide them with Internet access. Their bikes are equipped with a Wi-Fi wireless communication system inside a rear-mounted box with an antenna to enable e-mails to be relayed to schools in the villages via satellite dishes.They begin their day by collecting e-mails from the hub's dish and as they pass each school and a health center, they transmit the messages. At the end of the day, they return to the hub to transmit all the collected e-mail to the Internet.
E-mails on Wheels at Info Society Summit
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And then there's the bicycle-powered Internet in Laos being built by the Jhai Foundation.
Posted by gmoke | December 18, 2003 7:40 PM
Posted on December 18, 2003 19:40
Cool! Thanks for the link.
Posted by Jamais Cascio | December 19, 2003 2:29 PM
Posted on December 19, 2003 14:29
(Steve " 'dillo" Okay) Roadknight Mobility Labs who works with Jhai pointed out some other links:
"Rickshaws connecting India's Poor"
http://mt.multiplicity.dk/mt-tb.cgi/289
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3256516.stm
Then there's the CopenhagenConnectedCycle being worked on by the wire.less.dk folks like Tomas Krag in Denmark:
http://wire.less.dk/?en.9.3
Posted by gmoke | December 20, 2003 10:20 PM
Posted on December 20, 2003 22:20