There are lots of places in Pakistan where there aren’t mobile signals anywhere. A lot of Balochistan that we have gone for off-roading and camping for the night does not have cell coverage. Then there’s Australia where around 70 percent of its land has no cell coverage at all because there aren’t just enough people there. For those areas which have no cell coverage, Flinders University, Adelaide and the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, are working with Toyota to find a solution for backcountry communication.
With help from Toyota, they are trying to establish a system that uses small devices strapped on Land Cruisers roaming around the country creating a network for emergency communcation. It is similar to NASA’s concept for interplanetary communications. The Land Cruisers are equipped with the device, which uses combinations of WiFi, UHF radio waves and DTN (Delay Tolerant Networking) which scientists are testing for a long while to communicate between moving computers.
Toyota Land Cruiser thus becomes communications’ hotspot with a range of up to 15 miles, so someone within the range of the Cruiser can use its network with their phone to get a message out which would be relayed from one Land Cruiser to another until the message finds a fixed network base station.
Toyota has currently deployed a fleet of Land Cruisers equipped with this technology over an area of 30,000 square miles in the remote Flinders Ranges “to provide a first-of-its-kind disaster response lifeline one of the most cut-off places on earth.”
Different places, different problems, different culture. Land Cruisers in Pakistan have jammers — to prevent bomb blasts triggered by remote device.