Overview

Onebeep.org describes a method for digital transmission at about 1 kbps to the audio input ports of laptops via ordinary radio broadcast stations (AM or FM) and receivers with zero additional infrastructure costs.

This could be used for "flash" messages and indexes.

Items selected from the indexes could then be queued for request and higher speed delivery via cell phone and physical delivery networks.

Overnight say 8 hours of data would be about 8 x 3600 /8 = 3.6 MB. Even allowing for extensive forward error correction this could be adequate for newspaper delivery etc.