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The one-year Sp@ce Project consists of the sp@ce Mobile Free Internet Access Project and the sp@ce Mobile Internet Application Contest.

Under the first project, the company started distributing 30,000 SIM cards to students, lecturers and campus staff on June 2. They can use the SIM cards with their mobile phones or air-cards to connect to the Internet through DTAC's Edge/GPRS high-speed data transmission network free of charge within the university compound.

About 1,000 students have already picked up the SIM cards. Accessing the Internet outside the campus costs 0.1 satang per kilobyte of consumed data. Currently DTAC has about 2 million active EDGE users.

Amarit Sukhavanij, senior vice president and head of Next DTAC division, said the project offered a chance to seriously study the behaviour of Internet users in order to prepare for the launch of 3G mobile broadband services in the near future.

"We want to know how many are eager to use the service and what they will use it for. Moreover, most of our customers are upcountry, so we have to study the broadband market here," he said.

In addition, DTAC has organised the sp@ce Mobile Internet Application Contest to encourage the students to build mobile broadband applications.

"We will let the students develop applications for teenagers. If we do it by ourselves, we'll never know which ones can attract teenagers," Amarit said.

DTAC also opened its sp@ce Zone on the first floor of the university's College of Arts, Media and Technology as an application testing lab of teams of contestants.

One first-year student of the College of Arts, Media and Technology who picked up a SIM card said he used it with his mobile phone as a modem for his laptop computer to connect to the Internet outside the campus.

"I use it two or three hours per day search information, check e-mail and send homework at night," he said.

He said in general he hardly used his own SIM card to surf the Internet or he would end up paying high phone bills but instead always used the free wireless Internet service at the campus.

One sophomore said she used DTAC's Edge/GPRS SIM card to connect to the Internet for entertainment content and for sending homework outside the campus.

College director Nopasit Chakpitak said Chiang Mai University had about 33,000 students, of which 70 per cent own laptops.