Internet: IT takes a village

Laotian farmers, without power or phone service, may soon get connected to the Internet, thanks to an international team of tech-savvy volunteers. The volunteer engineers have designed and built a bicycle-powered PC in a village that will send signals, via an IEEE 802.11b connection, to a solar-powered mountain-top relay station. The signal is then bounced to a server in the nearest town with a phone service and electricity, 11 km away, and from there to the Internet and the world. This paper describes the project and the problems encountered.