Drive-By Wi-Fi
According to Red Herring, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company United Villages is working with the Indian NGO Drishtee to network 50 villages in India's eastern Orissa state using Wi-Fi-equipped buses. The idea was developed at MIT Asia Labs, and led to MIT graduate Amir Alexander Hasson's formation of United Villages.
"You have drive-by McDonald's, and we have drive-by Wi-Fi," Hasson says. The buses will pick up e-mail three or more times each day from Wi-Fi-enabled computers in kiosks, which Drishtee has been installing in the Indian countryside since 2000. The NGO is currently working with entrepreneurs to secure bank loans to buy Wi-Fi-enabled computers.
United Villages will then sell prepaid phone cards with an assigned phone number and e-mail address. "Drishtee pays UV as their ISP, and the kiosk operator pays UV 95 cents per card sold," he says. "We plan to network 220,000 villages. That adds up to a lot of money."
As the article notes, there's a huge potential customer base: 700 million Indians live outside the country's metropolitan centers.