Wi-Fi In a SIM Card 126
gaijin_ writes "What if, rather than buying a MiFi or using a Wi-Fi router app like those on the Palm Pre Plus, you could stick a SIM in any device and have a shared 3G connection? That's what Sagem Orga and Telefonica are promising: they've developed the SIMFi, a USIM card with an embedded Wi-Fi radio that, when dropped into any standard handset, can share the 3G HSPA connection with various Wi-Fi clients as an instant access point."
iTouch! (Score:4, Interesting)
The other way around is much more interesting - get iPod Touch and, if needed, connect via WiFi and this SIM card; placed in a mobile phone that is, well, primarily a good phone. Cheap. One of those with uberlong battery life.
On a sensibly priced contract or outright prepaid (I can get 4 GiB, valid for 3 months (and if recharged again before that 3 month cut-off, usnused data are added to new portion), for 12 Euro; good enough)
Re:I'm wondering (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, someone would be charged by an ISP for a connection to the internet, but you don't necessarily need the internet. It's easy to imagine a free mesh network running over nodes like this, with everyone running as a repeater for the common good. Various local services (bus schedules, local maps, restaurant locations, ordering a cab or a pizza) could be made available by servers connected to the mesh network without anyone paying for an internet connection. And of course people could run free exit nodes off their spare bandwidth at home or something to give the network some tenuous internet access.