Burning Man's open source cell phone system could help save the world


The Open Source SubnetCell towers that blend vs. those that offend




Two of OpenBTS's three founders are a duo of wireless design gurus that make up Kestrel Signal Processing: David Burgess and Harvind Samra. The third is industry luminary Glenn Edens, the same Edens who founded Grid Systems, maker of the first laptop in the early '80s, who is also known as the former director of Sun Microsystem's Laboratories (among his other credentials). He is Range Networks' CEO.

Burning Man has become a brutal, but great test vehicle. "There are not too many places you can go where tens of thousands of people show up, all of them with cell phones, in a hostile physical environment - lots of heat and dust, with no power and no cell service," Edens says.

GSM operates on licensed bandwidth, so for any U.S. installation, the OpenBTS crew always obtains a FCC license and works with the local carrier to coordinate frequency use. When attendees get into range and power up their phones, the system sends them a text that says "Reply to this message with your phone number and you can send and receive text messages and make voice calls."

Edens notes: "You can also make phone calls to any number, but you can't receive them, except from other people at Burning Man. We don't have a roaming agreement in place with any carriers yet. So calls from people out of range from Burning Man will go to voicemail ... but you can check your voicemail." (You can follow the progress of the system setup on Burgess's blog). 



It can use a wireless backhaul, too. "We're working with UC Berkeley on a really interesting project on super long distance wireless backhaul. We can also use private microwave and all the usual backhaul technologies," Edens says. A full-power base station with software costs around $10,000. Compare that to the typical $50,000 - $100,000 investment for base station controllers, mobile switching centers and "a whole lot of plumbing" to bring in power, backhaul, etc., in a traditional cellular network.

Like other GSM cell networks, OpenBTS networks can connect to the public switched network and the Internet. Because it converts to VoIP, it "makes every cell phone look like a SIP end point ... and every cell phone looks like an IP device. But we don't touch anything in the phone ... any GSM phone will work, from a $15 refurbished cell phone all the way up to iPhones and Androids."  Low cost phones are particularly important for projects in impoverished areas, where people can benefit most from better communications services.




Because OpenBTS relies on licensed bandwidth, the team hasn't been targeting enterprises wanting private campus-wide cell phone networks, though that's not out of the question. Still, Edens says there's plenty of work to be done for the 60% of the world's landmass and the 40% of the world's population that don't have service, he says, quoting number from the ITU. Carriers such as Telefonica to T-Mobile have expressed interest.

Edens is clearly as proud of the OpenBTS project's technological achievements as he is of its potential role to save the planet. "A lot of people said it couldn't be done. But software-defined radio technology has gotten so good. It's our second generation radios that we're testing now and although the three of us have done 98% of the coding work, we've had great support from the open source community."

More power to you.



This story, "Burning Man's open source cell phone system could help save the world" was originally published by Network World.

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