URL

https://github.com/acmeyer/travel-canny

What

A world-wide wireless network for any device.

Why

Being someone who loves to travel and despite how global the world has become, I constantly get frustrated by how walled in the world can be at times. This is especially true of wireless networks. In the future we won’t have to swap out a SIM card or be charged massive amounts of money to get normal wireless service for every country we travel to, it will just work. So I tried building this global wireless network using Twilio’s new Programmable Wireless product.

Learnings

• It is not very cost effective to do. Unfortunately, the powers that have control over the networks have a lot of price setting power and therefore make it pretty expensive to rent spectrum from them, making this idea pretty unfeasible unless you have more leverage.
• eSIMs are coming and are a better implementation of this idea.