Hey, screw Starbucks and its T-Mobile powered hotspot that costs more then a venti cappuccino for an hour’s use! Strap on your backpack and free the caffeine-heads from those small coffee tables ’cause you’ve just become “Mobile Wi-Fi,” baby! Popular Science has a full out DIY roaming hotspot instruction set along with a parts list. Everything you need to know can be found in this excellent, and illustrated, article. I can see it now, our city streets packed with Mobile Wi-Fi units everywhere! Let the freedom begin!

Mike Outmesguine of Popular Science writes:

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…

[Continue reading Be Your Own Hotspot]

[tags]wi-fi,ev-do,hotspot,backpack[/tags]