Wifi hippies unite!!!!

Ok, this is cool and all, I especially appreciate the addition of the solar panels, but there has to be a better way. $599 plus the cost of the cell modem service, ouch. Why not plug the cell modem into a laptop then connect an Ethernet cable to a plain vanilla 802.11b access point and then use internet connection sharing to allow folks to connect to the net? Seems to me this would be a better solution than this seven hundred dollar ($699.00 without a service agreement) wonder box. I guess the addition of the laptop and AP would draw on the battery more than the dedicated device (wonder box) but you could use the cost savings to purchase a larger, more powerful battery or solar panel. Eh, go fish.

Be Your Own Hotspot
Turn a backpack into a portable, solar-powered Wi-Fi hotspot, and share a high-speed connection anywhere

By Mike Outmesguine

I love the fact that more and more devices are sporting built-in Wi-Fi—the Sony PSP, smartphones, even Kodak’s EasyShare-One digital camera. The lone hitch: Wi-Fi is useless without a hotspot. Sure, thousands of spots are available, but few are free, and coverage is far from ubiquitous. What if you could marry the short-range power of Wi-Fi with the huge coverage areas of high-speed cellular services such as EV-DO to create a portable hotspot? You could use any Wi-Fi-enabled gadget anywhere you’ve got a cell signal. Play multiplayer games with friends in the park, or blog an event in real-time. Since EV-DO works at freeway speeds, you could even give Internet access to an entire road-trip caravan.

Those are exactly the kinds of things you can do with the backpack below. Its secret ingredient: the Junxion Box. Plug a cellular-network card into the book-size open-source-based device, and voilà—instant Wi-Fi hotspot, with speeds averaging around 700 kilobits per second. To power the box, I wired it to a 1.2-amp-hour battery and dropped both into the Voltaic Systems backpack, which has a built-in solar charger. Now I can surf for as long as three hours without being tethered to anything but a cell signal. The project isn’t cheap, but prices for the components and service are sure to come down in the next year or so. In the meantime, you can find me in the hills around Southern California. I’ll be the one surrounded by PSP-packing hikers.

take a look for youself...
link to wonder box...