Article
This article reports on the use of mobile phones to run internet cafes in Fultola, an area of Bogra town, in Bangladesh. At first sight, it looks like a standard Internet cafe – a one-room ‘commercial unit’ which opens onto a bustling street. Four screens each with a keyboard and mouse, customers browsing the Web and reading email. But look inside and you find that this “Community Information Centre” (CIC) is radically different from a typical Internet cafe. For one thing, there’s only one PC, which functions as a server. For another, there’s no wired connection between the server and the outside world. Yet the Centre is clearly hooked up to the internet…