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broadband Business

Rural Broadband Replacement – Broadband in a Bottle #trefandrory

I hope that someone gets my…I hope that someone gets my…I hope that someone gets my broadband in a bottle.

You heard about the tref and rory pigeons versus rural broadband race. Well not everyone has access to a pigeon. However everyone can get hold of a USB memory stick and put it in a bottle with a cork in it. The idea is you load your content onto the memory, put it in the bottle, cork it and throw it into the stream running along the side of the cowfield.

In due course the bottle will make its way downstream and no doubt be picked up by someone who will open it and take out the memory stick. This will inevitably be somewhere with better internet access. Upon placing it in their PC (no doubt scanning it for viruses) they will click on a readme.txt file which will ask them to email the contents to your planned destination.

Simple. Don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it before:)

Here is the test bottle – picked it up from the Oaisys stand at the  Convergence Summit South.

memory stick in a bottle
memory stick in a bottle – for when you have run out of pigeons

click to enlarge.

7 replies on “Rural Broadband Replacement – Broadband in a Bottle #trefandrory”

and of course in the summer when the level of water in rivers is running low you are quite likely to get congestion where too many bottles are trying to make it through the same small gap

Further thoughts …
Given : Two old army buddies (ex-Royal Artillery ?), their dogs, a pair of signal mortars, and a supply of soft-nosed rounds (don’t want to punch a hole in the roof) with parachutes.
Result : A high-arc commo channel that goes over a ridge or hill. Just the thing to have ready for 5 Nov. (Guy Fawkes, see below).

P.S. My earlier post was prompted in part by thoughts of Mij (aka Mijbil, from Ring of Bright Water) rather than Tarka.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night

Of course it is also worth considering alternative options. I could have had my haircut in the farmhouse so that the farmer could see it in real life rather than trying to watch it on YouTube. I could also have sent it digitally via beacon fires lit on hilltops or as a watercolour painting via coach and horses, all of which would have been more interesting than watching the video not upload 🙂

It is funny how a short trip across the world can open your eyes to how other countries deliver internet services. Stood recently on my honeymoon in Hong Kong I realised it was costing me 85ppm to call my kids so I found a quiet spot, I searched for a free wireless hotspot and used hosted VoIP to call my kids at less than a penny a minute ! Now down town Hong Kong is not exactly rural but I then turned up to the middle of the jungle in Bali a few days later and did the same from a coffee shop in Ubud ! For anyone who has been there they will know that that truly is rural broadband…

Ubud, Bali, Indonesia on Google Maps (more info section w/ small map) :

http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ftid=0x2dd23d0d964ec3b7:0x4030bfbca7d2d30&q=ubud,bali&hl=en&cad=src:pplink_gc&ei=O2qwTL6AI4icoATG07iWCg

Felicitations to Hodge. This would be on a par with crossing the American Mid-west in an earlier day and seeing a line of telegraph poles in the distance. Those poles would mark the possibility of a whistle stop (unscheduled RR service) and maybe a telegraph station for messages.

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