You know, there's been an awful lot of travel posting around here lately. This one is for the techs/teks/tex....
I'm sitting at the bottom tip of India pondering the idea of living here, but with one major addition: a proper data connection. There is no DSL in India. No broadband cable. I haven't seen a dish in ages. Internet cafes routinely have 10 PCs sharing one 56k line. All the while I'm happily getting 3 - 5 times their speed through my mobile phone. And my cost is only 99Rs a month ($2.20) for all-you-can-eat GPRS access.
Which gave me an idea. Group together a handful of cheap (used) mobile phones with GPRS and link them (Bluetooth or USB) to a junk Linux box to make a cheap, redundant and scalable wireless modem. For $650 ($500 for 4 phones and a $150 PC) you could get 1024kb/s -- DSL speeds, but symmetric as well.
Oh yeah, use a laptop with wi-fi instead and you become a mobile hotspot with a one-megabit connection. Not bad.
Thoughts?
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