Further to my piece on WiFi for the masses, here’s another way to cut costs: Make your own WiFi dish out of a Chinese cooking vat scoop, poke a USB WiFi dongle through the mesh, and you can pick up signals more than 10 kilometres away. Total cost: about $40 for the USB dongle, NZ$8 for the dish.
The guy behind this, Kiwi Stan Swan, has previously developed the Sardine Can Antenna. I love the ideas and think he should be marketing them to those parts of the world where WiFi is turning into a bridge from having no communications at all to having Internet and VoIP.