Google wants to use high-altitude balloons to bring the Internet to some of the most isolated parts of the world. Facebook is trying to do the same thing with drones. And multiple companies are now competing to blanket the world with satellite Internet. But Paul Gardner-Stephen has a much simpler idea. He wants to use cars.

Well, more specifically, Toyota Land Cruisers, the iconic four-wheel drive vehicles known for their all-terrain aplomb before SUVs were ever a thing. They're especially popular as a way to get around the more foreboding reaches of the Australian Outback, where Gardner-Stephen was to use them as nodes in a new kind of emergency communications network.

Gardner-Stephen, a senior lecturer at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, and co-founder of the open source messaging project Serval, is working with Toyota and the creative firm Saatchi & Saatchi to outfit LandCruisers with emergency communications hotspots. If someone is lost in the Outback or needs help, the system would allow them to connect to one of these hotspots via Wi-Fi. The hotspot would then seek out any other Land Cruiser hotspots within a range of a little over 15 miles and pass the emergency beacon along to them. With enough properly equipped LandCruisers, the message would travel up the chain until it finally reached emergency first responders.

That's not as ambitious as blanketing the entire continent with high-speed wireless Internet. But the system could address a real need in the Outback. Australia is the third-least densely populated country in the world. Huge swaths of the continent still lack cellular coverage, which makes emergency communication expensive and difficult in remote areas. If Gardner-Stephen and his team are successful, roving LandCruiser hotspots could eventually advance beyond emergency response to offer voice and data services in the Outback and elsewhere.

Saatchi & Saatchi Australia

Vehicles as Infrastructure

But why Land Cruisers? The sport utility vehicles are the closest thing that the Outback has to ubiquitous infrastructure. Toyota boasts that Land Cruisers have 90 percent market share in some parts of the Outback and estimates that nearly half-a-million of the vehicles are in use in Australia.

The problem with using balloons or drones, Gardner-Stephen says, is that those services can be disrupted, particularly during disasters. Smoke clouds caused by wildfires could block wireless communications. Cyclones, meanwhile, could blow balloons away and make flying drones impossible. Land Cruisers, on the other hand, are already ground-tested for the Outback's adverse conditions.

Land Cruisers are the closest thing that the Outback has to ubiquitous infrastructure.

To be sure, the project is also about PR. It grew out of discussions between Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi as a way to reward Australians' Land Cruiser loyalty, says Mike Spirkovski, a creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi Australia. The firm came up with the idea of building an emergency communications network based on the vehicles and designed the physical devices, which Spirkovski says are meant to look a bit like ancient scrolls. "People passed scrolls to each other to communicate, so we've also based the design around that," he says.

But the two companies reached a point that they needed outside help to build the technology itself. That's where Gardner-Stephen comes in. Since the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Gardner-Stephen and the Serval team have been building decentralized mobile messaging systems for use during disasters, especially in remote areas or places that have lost cell service. (It's comparable to the better-known messaging app FireChat.) Serval Mesh is a peer-to-peer messaging and voice-calling application for Android that users Wi-Fi instead of cellular service to connect devices together, while Serval Chat is an iOS app that uses Apple's proprietary peer-to-peer wireless network.

The Serval team had already built much of the core technology required to pass messages between different devices, but the LandCruiser Emergency Network project requires adapting the underlying technology not only to different hardware but to the ultra high frequency (UHF) wireless spectrum required to achieve longer distance communications.

Saatchi & Saatchi Australia

First the Outback, Then the World

The team is currently piloting the technology with 10 LandCruisers in the Flinders Ranges mountain range in South Australia, but Gardner-Stephen warns that the technology is still in a prototype phase. "It's a bit like the Death Star in the Return of the Jedi," he says. "The big gun works, but if you open the wrong door you might find the vacuum of space on the other side."

Even once the technical kinks are worked out, the project will have a long way to go before it can be deployed throughout Australia. The hope is to create a working version of the technology and then work with the government to license the necessary wireless spectrum and integrate with official emergency response systems (during the pilot program, emergency messages will be routed to a wilderness sanctuary and then forwarded to first responders). The country may even need to change some of its laws to to protect LandCruiser drivers from liability—no one wants to be sued because their hotspot delivered an emergency message too late to save a life.

Spirkovski says that once the emergency communications system is finished, Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi are absolutely interested in expanding it to carry voice and data, much like the Serval apps. And Gardner-Stephen already has a few ideas for applying the technology in new ways. For example, animal protection laws require farmers in the Outback to check their traps every day, which can be time-consuming. Gardner-Stephen imagines connecting those traps wirelessly to the Land Cruiser communication network, notifying farmers when the traps are sprung and saving them the hassle of checking each one manually. "It's the sort of thing big industrial farms already have, but we could bring it to smaller farmers," he says.

"The first implementation would be emergency services," Spirkovski says. "Then we could move into farm lands and then to the public. It would roll out across the country, and then the world."

It's the mobile internet. Except in this case, it's the internet itself that's on the move.