Rafat Ali has gone wireless in Aligarh, a small town about 90 miles south of Delhi, India’s capital…

bq. How things have changed in a year (see the third post on the linked page): I am accessing the Internet by connecting my laptop to a 3G CDMA mobile phone from local operator Reliance, and getting decent speeds of upto 90 KBPS…

bq. Since the phone uses wireless local loop nationwide, this gives me true roaming, that is, I will be on a local phone charge wherever I go in India, and hence will have local Net access. This, in some ways, beats Wi-Fi, at least in terms of getting Net access, if not in speed. Now if only someone can figure out how to prolong battery life in laptops and mobile phones, without adding on the weight…

Related: The situation a year ago: The United States of India: “Basic telecom progress anywhere outside big cities is a pipe dream, literally and figuratively. And a clogged one at that.”