Internet-in-a-Box is a Raspberry Pi that’s packed with the most important free knowledge on the internet that you can deploy anywhere, any time.
About 2.6 billion people can’t open a browser and search for what they need. It’s not because they don’t have internet-capable devices — many already own phones, computers, or tablets. The problem is that there’s no internet where they live, or their government won’t let them access what they want to see. Internet-in-a-Box was created as a workaround to this problem: a palm-sized device that broadcasts educational and reference materials over Wi-Fi to anyone nearby. It requires no active internet connection, no recurring fees, and it doesn’t track what users search.
The project kicked off in 2012 as a spinoff of One Laptop Per Child’s school server project. Now, Internet-in-a-Box is running in over 100 countries, spread across Haitian orphanages, villages in the Indian mountains, medical clinics across the Dominican Republic, schools in rural Ghana, and classrooms throughout Myanmar. Building one yourself runs around $80 if you source the parts, but if you’re not all that technically savvy or just need a quick solution, the Wikipedia Store will sell you a pre-built unit for $58.
Each Internet-in-a-Box is built on a Raspberry Pi — a computer barely larger than a credit card — paired with a microSD card loaded with compressed archives of websites and includes software to make the content searchable in seconds. Users connect through a local Wi-Fi network and can explore massive databases while remaining entirely offline.
The content library isn’t limited to Wikipedia. It pulls in material from across the open web to build something closer to a miniature knowledge ecosystem. Students can work through Khan Academy’s full catalog of video lessons and practice exercises, while Project Gutenberg adds thousands of classic books that are free to read and distribute.
