A digital pony express is operating in Cambodia.

The system, developed by First Mile Solutions, uses a receiver box powered by the motorcycle’s battery. Five Motomen ride their routes five days a week, downloading and uploading e-mail. The driver need only roll slowly past the school to download all the village’s outgoing e-mail and deliver incoming e-mail. Using 5 Honda motorcycles equipped with FMS Mobile Access Points, it links to 15 solar-powered village schools, telemedicine clinics, and governor’s office in a remote province of Cambodia

Newly collected information is stored for the day in a computer strapped to the back of the motorcycle. At dusk, the motorcycles converge on the provincial capital, Ban Lung, where a school is equipped with a satellite dish, allowing a bulk e-mail exchange with the outside world.

The Motoman program is sponsored by American Assistance for Cambodia and the Media Laboratory of MIT. The Media Lab gives technical advice to the Motoman program, which offers Third World schools a way to cut costs by sharing one dish and one uplink fee.

The entire network was implemented within one month by a team of three people at a cost of approximately $500 per village.

Users say the Motoman system is starting to change lives.

“It helps us with our diagnoses,” Chanmarith Ly, deputy director of the provincial hospital in Ban Lung, said of the telemedicine project that allows him to send photographs of patients, X-rays, ultrasound images and electrocardiograms to specialists in Boston at Partners Telemedicine, a program of the Partners HealthCare System.

Doctors from the staff of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School review the files and send diagnoses, all pro bono. The project was implemented for CambodiaSchools.com, which operates 225 rural schools throughout Cambodia with funding from private donors and the World Bank.

It’s reminicent of Linux based Felsenstein PCs operated by pedal-powered generators, which deliver wireless connectivity to the region in rural Cambodia.

The store and forward concept, originally used by spies to relay messages to and from low orbit satellites, may have other applications.

Consider store-and-forward videos served by mass transit. A Gigabyte video file can take hours to download. But a tiny iPod-like device with a 100-400 Mbps wireless connection (using UWB or 802.11n), might transfer multimedia content to transit stops. The Rockford Omnifi DMP1 ($600 street) is a trunk-mounted 20GB jukebox. It has USB 2.0 and 802.11b connections, along with a small synchronization applet for a PC. USB is for the initial transfer, and Wi-Fi is for daily updates.

Train stops could offer Video On Demand with new selections daily — the train is the bulk data carrier and circulates every hour or so along the route. Cross-connections downtown could supply the “switch”. I was told that Tri-Met, our local transit authority calculates only 8 seconds per transit stop. It may not be enough time. The fuel stop at the beginning of the shift could upload new videos. P2P could pass data between stops. Buses or commuter aircraft might upload data from remote “motes” in situ or in trees along the interstate. Here’s a Linux computer that can fit in a collar. With an SD WiFi card, you’re good to go.

A PocketPC with a 512M-1Gbyte CompactFlash/SD card could download movies while waiting for the train. No fiber required. Play them at home with a USB-2 reader. Pocket movies only need a 128MB card.

Space Data may have a cheaper solution. A network of balloons, hovering at 100,000 feet, (about 20 miles up) will provide wireless services. Space Data was the high bidder on more than 1.4 MHz in the 900 MHz band at the FCC’s most recent auction. Riding piggyback on Weather Service balloons they can cover a 360-mile diameter circle. Space Data was expected to launch commercial service in 2003.

Related Dailywireless stories include Balloon Relays, Internet Rickshaw, Transit Wireless, Wi-Fi on Trains, Wi-Fi Ferry, On The Bus, Cybercar, Limousine Wi-Fi, Highspeed Mobile Roaming, Shared Public-Safety Communications, Sharing a satellite van, College WiFi Van, Death to CDPD, Transit Mapping, Transportation MESH, Mapping To Go, WiFi Caravan II, Inter-Op Wi-Fi, Intelligent Transportation, Oregon’s Statewide Wireless Net, Tracking RF-ID, Nomadix + Hughes Direcway, MotoSat Lowers Cost, MPEG-4 Cable News, MPEG-4 On the Move, Satellite Wi-Fi, Sharing Community Satellite Networks and Spot Beams.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Wednesday, January 28th, 2004 at 5:17 am.