 Hello out there. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. I'd like to welcome you to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2013 webinar series. Our webinar today was developed in collaboration with Curtis Heiml. My name is Yana Aranda and I will be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not moderating, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I'm a Senior Program Manager. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Building and Running Community Settler Networks with OpenDTF. Information systems are a key focus area at E4C and we're always seeking to share insights about the growing fields of information and communication technologies for development, or ICT4D. To do so, we've been by today's presenter, Curtis, who is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley and an ICT4D practitioner. Curtis, we thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the co-ordinators of the E4C webinar series. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown and Alex Torres of IEEE, as well as Victoria Chang, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we turn things over to our presenter, we thought it would be a good idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of over 16,000 technically-minded members and more than 30,000 social media followers, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges, whether in water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, or other areas faced by underserved communities around the world today. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies like ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters such as MIT CLAB, international development agencies like USAID, EWBUSA, the Practical Action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy. And it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly-available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring leading edge technology and solutions to bear on global humanitarian development challenges, information on upcoming installments in the series, as well as archive videos of past presentations can be found on the E4C webinar page. You see the link listed right there. If you're on Twitter, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation by using the hashtag E4C webinars. I'd also like to take a moment to recognize an important occasion today. It's World Toilet Day. Did you know that toilets have saved more lives than vaccinations and seatbelts? It's a huge deal. This World Toilet Day is especially meaningful, and it's recognized officially this year by the UN General Assembly demonstrating the world's commitment to changing behavior and policy on issues such as enhancing water management and ending open defecations. We encourage you to learn more by visiting worldtoiletday.org and checking out Jackson's webinar from E4C. Jackson is the founder of World Toilet Day, or joining the conversation on Twitter today. It's an exciting opportunity to learn why toilets are incredibly important. E4C's next webinar will be on December on a date to be announced at 11 a.m. Eastern Center on the topic of building a successful startup at the intersection of technology and humanitarian development. Our presenter will be Sharon Langevin, who is the partnership development manager for World Reader, a nonprofit working to eradicate illiteracy by delivering the largest culturally-relevant library to the world's poorest people, digitally and inexpensively. To learn more and register, please visit the E4C webinars page in about a few days. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation soon. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the chat window located on your right, I'd like to ask you to type in your location I'll show what I mean by typing in mine. Oh my goodness, we have lots of folks here today from all over the states. I'm seeing someone from Malaysia. We have folks from Chile, lots of folks from Chile, Canada, Wisconsin, New York City, India, amazing. It's so great to have you guys join us from all over the world. Any technical questions or miniature problems should go in this very same chat window. And also, feel free to share a private chat with Holly or myself should you have a specific inquiry. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks you may have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window which is located directly below the chat window to type in your questions for the presenter. That way we can keep track of all the questions. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. If that doesn't work, you can use the call-in number for the teleconference. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request the certificate of completion showing one professional development hour or PAH for the session, please provide your full name and the date that you completed this webinar as well as the code that we will provide you at the end of the session. Send this information to EAB-CEUadmin at IEEE.org. See more folks here. Enter their locations. Fantastic, guys. All over the US. Very cool. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce today's presenter, Curtis Hymerl. And I apologize, Curtis, if I'm messing up your last name. Curtis is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley working under Eric Burr in the EECS in Toppen Park in the iSchool. His work focuses primarily on cellular systems and their intersection with international development. He's interested in education, having worked on the MetaMouse group learning program, crowdsourcing, winning the best paper at CHI for work on CHI-based crowdsourcing systems. And of course, cellular systems for rural areas, winning the Community Award at NSDI. He'll be graduating in the winter and is very excited about the future of rural connectivity. And we're very excited to have you, Curtis. I'll turn it over to you now. Okay. Hi, everybody. If you can't hear me, please say something. If you can't hear me, please say something. Make sure this is all working. So let me figure out if the interface is new to me. Okay, yes. So who am I? I've mentioned before. I'm a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. I actually just gave my dissertation talk a little less than a week ago. Exactly. And this is the content of my thesis, roughly. So first off, I should mention the people that I work with. This is Professor Eric Breuler in the computer science here at Berkeley. He has founded the tier group. It's been running for the last ten years. This is technology and infrastructure for emerging regions groups here at Berkeley. They work in a diverse number of projects. Biggest ones are long-distance Wi-Fi, which you can see sort of the industrial version of that being something like ubiquity long-distance wireless routers. Right now, they also work on microgrid projects, as well as rural cellular, which is my work. I also work with this man, Professor Tafin Karik of the iSchool. He runs the represent group. They do a lot of interesting work, my favorite of which is local ground. This is a community mapping solution, which has been used in both the United States and a couple developing regions. So this is really my space at Berkeley. I work on these two things. I work with these two professors, and these are my two colleagues. On the left is Kashif Ali, and on the right is Shadi Hassan. Both of them work on the Village Base Station project with me and have been to Papua and participated in-depth on all of this. I just wanted to give my shout-outs to everyone who helps out with this. Obviously, I'm one person giving one talk, but there's a lot of other people involved. So first, I wanted to lead off with sort of a light background on cellular telephony as a thing. The cell phone is probably the most impactful technology from the light bulb, the sense of light bulb, and it's definitely true in terms of adoption. The last estimate is that there are 6.6 billion subscribers on Earth, and of course, subscribers aren't people, but the number of subscribers is not the number of people. Many people have two SIM cards or have two accounts, but it's over 3 billion people, assuredly, and that actually happened in just 25 years. So you compare this to the Internet, which has about 2 billion subscribers right now, 2.2, I believe, and the Internet started in the 1970s. So in terms of adoption, there's just nothing else. There's a huge uptake in this technology by billions of people throughout the world. And there's a bunch of studies that show why these cell phones are so important. Jensen is this wonderful economist out of UCLA who showed how bringing cell phones to an area removes or decreases information asymmetries and makes things a little more efficient. Waverman has a study arguing that bringing cell phones to an area, like an increase in cell phone adoption, actually directly increases UDP. And my own personal experience is that people really, really value basic telecommunications. And at the end of the day, this basic human communication is a basic human need, and you're going to see it everywhere in the world. But if you do the math a little bit, what you'll see is that, you know, 6 billion subscribers is not quite to the population of the Earth. And so there's at least 700 million people who are just not in areas with coverage. And that's really the goal of our project here at Berkeley, is to bring cell telecommunications to that remaining 700 billion people who aren't getting coverage. Right now, cell phone networks are focusing on 3G and 4G deployments in urban areas because there's so much revenue there bringing people this high speed internet access. And so they're not coming to these rural areas anytime soon. So this invites the first question, why don't they have cell phone coverage? And the answer is actually, I would say relatively simple. It's just basic economics at the end of the day. Rural areas are expensive to cover. There's two forces that work here. The first is that they're just more expensive, right? If you are a big cell phone operator and you're in the capital, be it Delhi or Jakarta or, you know, the large city, it's expensive for you to fly equipment out to this rural area and install it. You know, you have to drive stuff, things just get harder. Employees are harder to find so on. So is it more expensive for traditional carriers to come to these areas? At the same time, there's less subscribers by definition of it being a rural area and so they're going to get less revenue for that installation. So it's a cost more and they get less revenue. At some point, the economics just cease to work and cell phone towers don't go into those areas anymore. And so occasionally there's mechanisms to force carriers to cover these areas. These are universal service obligations where basically all the carriers pay into a fund and then that fund subsidizes installations in rural areas. But at the end of the day, if you're a major telco, you would prefer to avoid any of these obligations even though they give subsidies and do an install in the city of a 4G network and make a ton of money. So the networks aren't coming to these rural areas. There's also a structural argument which is that the only people who can install cell phone networks in these rural areas are major telecommunication firms situated in the capital. This is enforced through spectrum regulation. To get a spectrum license to run a GSM network often costs literally hundreds of millions of dollars and is usually a nationwide spectrum license. For example, in Indonesia, there's three carriers of spectrum licenses in the GSM band and they own all of it. It's all gone. There's no other spectrum available. Despite the fact that in many rural areas, the spectrum is almost completely unused. So our solution to this, the thing that we proposed in our research here, is this idea of community cellular networks. We're going to step in and start talking about the tech a little bit now. You might think a cell phone tower is something like this. This is a big box sitting underneath a giant tower with a big generator to even see the diesel sitting there to power it. And then a big, enormous, big iron hardware solution. So this is $500,000 to a million dollars of install cost. But this is sort of an older model of what cell phone towers are like. Right now, it's actually just a small rack mount unit. On the top you see a range network 5150 base station. That's about $10,000 and it's a full-featured telecommunications firm. This isn't even just the base station. It does routing, it does billing, it does everything. On the lower left you see an Edison Research USRP B100. This is $700. You plug this thing into your laptop and you run open BTS and you're able to be, again, a full future telco with routing and billing and all of this stuff. And so given a laptop and this B100 and of course some other equipment to make it wider area, power amplifier and so on, you're able to be a full telco. And this is a dramatic reimagining of what these networks look like. Instead of these big iron, huge investment solutions, we can now do smaller scale solutions. So this is really the base of where we come with community cellular networks. Once we get to that spot where you can build your own cell phone network for $10,000, it enables smaller operators to participate in these markets. Communities even and that's where we come here. So community cellular networks are, by definition, owned, operated locally. Locally within whatever community. In rural areas the reason to do this is that effectively local operators in rural areas are able to operate more efficiently. And they can do this because of, I don't know if anyone on here is from a rural area, but there's this concept in my world, I'm from Alaska, a concept of redneck engineering. And the idea is that sometimes you can jury rig a solution to a problem where if you are AT&T you don't jury rig anything because you have the right answer to all of your problems. And so if a bolt breaks on a rural base station, you go back to New York or wherever, get that bolt and go back to the rural area. In the rural area what you do is you sit down and you find another bolt or you weld something or you grind something down, you do any of these things. You'll see some solutions of this kind of engineering in our deployment. Local operators are also able to use local infrastructure. This is like power generators or even social capital. If you're again AT&T what happens is you have to bring a diesel generator with you when you install one of these towers. You bring solar panels or you bring a tower. If you are a member of the local community you can say, hey I will give you a cut of the profit if you let me use this infrastructure that you paid for and installed earlier. And so all of these really let dry the cost of the base station installation down even further. Similarly, or lastly I should say, these locals really care about their businesses. When you have someone who owns the equipment in the community then if something breaks they want to fix it. Again if you're AT&T and you're far away and it might sound like I'm booting on AT&T so I'll change my example. You're Verizon. Then that base station goes down and you start losing revenue. You say, okay we'll open a trouble ticket and in two weeks the tech will go out there and fix it. So these are the reasons to operate locally. Similarly we really think these networks need to be small scale. You might expect a major telco to be 100,000 or 10,000 nodes. Minor telcos which you only really see in the U.S. in my sense, these are usually just roaming providers are like 100. We really want these community cellular networks to be less than 10 nodes to keep that local focus that we were talking about. Lastly because these towers are operated locally you can really tune them to community goals. If you're a major telco, if you're a Verizon or Telcom seller, whomever coming into a community your goals are set from national policy. Be it profit if you are sort of a traditional multinational corporation or if you're a public telco, which occasionally do is this Chinese uniform was an example, you have the motives of the state. None of them have the motives of the community and a community base station can have the motives of the community. An example would be if a health NGO decided to put up a cell phone tower. For instance maybe they're just running a hospital. They could change the tower so that the nurses get free calls. They could provide dynamic numbering systems so when you call in you go through a list of nurses or it helps route things or even an IVR, like a call script that comes in and lets you route to the right person. All these things can be put into the base station and have it tuned for this specific community rather than expecting this to be a generic experience across an entire country. So these are community settler networks. Here's a few examples of these networks. One of my favorites is Burning Man. Every year the founders, the initial authors of OpenBTS come to Burning Man and set up a network. You can see in the back there's a big tower. It's got Papa Legba, which is a team name. And they set up a network for the community at Burning Man. So here's Shadi and I sitting on an ambulance installing OpenBTS and some range hardware for a mobile tower installation. Oh, sure, that's a good point. Sorry, I forget that not everyone knows what Burning Man is. Burning Man is a very large sort of festival that happens in the desert in California every year. And since it's out in the desert, no one has cell phone coverage, but there's literally 60,000 people out there. It's a week-long music and various other things, festivals. So we've been coverage to them and the idea is always, again, to tune it to the specific community. So being this far out and this far from coverage, a lot of people want to talk to family and friends who are worried about them and haven't heard from them. So we support outbound communication. Another property of Burning Man is that there's no money allowed. And so we don't charge for any services. We just give them away for free as a service to the community. This is an example of a community cellular network, although a small-scale one. It's primarily used for testing hardware because the desert is an extremely difficult place to operate. So hardware is tested there. We put up a network in a couple of days and run it for that week of the festival and then tear it down. A more sustainable network would be this one in Oaxaca, Mexico. So this is run by a friend of ours named Peter Bloom and Shavi. So the two of them got some hardware and put it up within a community in rural Oaxaca, Mexico, which didn't have coverage. Oaxaca is an interesting example because these communities actually have a lot of infrastructure. The one that this one is located in called Pele. Pele has a basketball court, clean water, power, a bar, a hotel, just stuff where it's silly that there's no coverage because there's people and there's money. But the thing is that Mexican telecom rules state that you only get the USO subsidy for installing in a place over 5,000 people. And tele is probably 3,500 people. And so the telecoms won't come in because they won't get the subsidy, so there's no coverage despite all of this wonderful infrastructure. They even have strong internet. So Peter went in and talked to the community. Another interesting property of Oaxaca is that there's no private property in this particular place. You drive in and there's this sign that says no more private property beyond this line. Everything is public. So he goes into the community and speaks to the local government and pitches them this base station idea. So they put it up. And at this point it's a completely community-run, cooperatively-owned cell phone network. The community makes all the decisions about its operation. For instance, they chose to not charge anything for local calls and only charge routebound calls. And so they've had some congestion issues as people overutilized that resource because it's free. So then he comes back to the community and they try to come up with a solution. And their solution was to limit all calls to five minutes. So it's another great example of a community network and a community really owning and making decisions about their network. And lastly we come to our network. This is a network in Papua, Indonesia. So Papua is an incredibly interesting place. It's super sparse. It's got about nine people per square kilometer, almost all located in Jayapura, the capital of Papua. Our deployment is in the highland in the center of the island, to this mountainous backbone, at a missionary school. This missionary school is about four hours drive from the nearest cell phone coverage, which is a town called Wamana. And there's no internet to the entire island of Papua, like no fiber lines. So everything is reset. And this means even if you're in Wamana on the major telcos network, which is, how come so? You have really bad coverage. It's some of the worst I've ever been present for. My favorite is in Jayapura and actually watching the bars on my cell phone go up and down constantly. I don't even know how you could do that, but they did it. In Wamana, you can make calls, and it's just like talking through a echo chamber. So everyone just texts all the time because the network is so bad. So we found this community outside of Wamana where they didn't have coverage, but they wanted coverage. The nice property of this community is that there's this missionary school where they already had power and network available. You can see that satellite dish installed. That was primarily used for Facebook, for teachers and things like that, for people to stay in touch with their wider social networks. And they also had power infrastructure available. They have a multi-kilowatt hydro installation, which is used to power the school projectors and some laptops and lights and things like this. I'm not sure what my next slide is. So we installed in this community called DEZA. It's about 1,500 people. Outside of the school, there's no power or network. The school has those. The community is not. Interestingly, even though there's no power and there's no cell phone covers, there's a ton of phones. And this is what you'll find almost anywhere on Earth, just an enormous amount of cell phones despite the difficulty of using them. And here's an insulation. You can see the solar panel attached to a hut. And inside is the top picture. There's a karaoke machine and a bunch of cell phones. So this guy would charge money to come in here to use these things and charge your phone. So tons of phones. We actually saw thousands of phones in our time there. We installed the base station into this box, you can see, and then put it into a tree as a tower. This is an example of local people bringing things cheaper. If we were telecoms, we'd come in and we'd put in a literal cell phone tower. And it's no doubt hundreds of thousands of dollars to get it out here. The road is terrible. You'll probably have to fly it in. The airstrip is quite short, so you'll have to do a series of flights. Or you can just attach it to a pole and put that pole into a tree. And that's what we did. So this base station went up in this tree and we were able to provide coverage to the community. A couple pieces about our deployment is that it was only SMS networks. We did local voice, but not outbound voice. And that's because that satellite link was super congested. It couldn't handle it. No data access yet, but we can turn that on soon. And interestingly, we had to use Swedish phone numbers. This is because you can't rent Indonesian phone numbers on the Internet right now. So I should change those pictures. We deployed a bunch of services on the base station to try to customize it for the community. One of these, I mean, the short codes were a simple one. We gave the doctor and the community short code, the police officer, and the network operator all have short codes. They're like 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, and 1, 1, 1, I think. So these were free local communication. We haven't contacted any of those people. They'd be free. We had SMS broadcast services that would let us send messages to everyone who was a user. We built a credit transfer system, so we actually built a full prepaid credit system in a way for users to transfer credit between each other. We built a thing called Village Idol, which was just a singing competition that ran on the network because all the local calls were free, so we could do that. We said this network and ran it. So the overarching point of this webinar was really to try to do a DIY how you can build one of these things, example. And we're going to start doing that by going into a little bit of depth into OpenBTS and the system at place. So this is the diagram of the internals of an OpenBTS installation, specifically our installation in Papaloids using free switch instead of asterisk, which is being used in Oaxaca Network and in most OpenBTS installations. So I want to talk about all the component pieces, and then I'll show some demos of stuff going on. For the admins, when am I supposed to be done with this talk? It's like 8.45? Yes, between 8.40 and 8.45. 8.40 and 8.45, okay, good. So the first core component of the system is OpenBTS. OpenBTS is built by Harbin Samra and David Burgess, two very smart dudes. The basic idea was to convert from GSM, which is the 2G cell phone standard, to voiceover IP, which is the traditional internet telephony solution. And so all it really does is act as a gateway of those two things. You plug in a radio and what it does is it produces the right signals on the radio for your phone to talk to and then converts it all to voiceover IP for the rest of the system. This core idea was fantastic. It's been commercialized on numerous occasions now, and it solves that problem pretty well. Because then we're really able to use all open source components after that, because there's a bunch of open source stuff for voiceover IP. These are things like free switch, asterisk, Canal does some of this. There's just a whole ton of this whole world of internet stuff and taking it away from the cell phone people, because cell phone networks are usually closed source and expensive. And the open source world is, of course, open source and free. So by converting from this cell phone world to this internet world, we're able to really drop the price of this stuff quite a bit. So that's OpenBTS. Next piece is SIP Offserve. So SIP Offserve is basically a replacement home location register in a cell phone network. What this does is decide what users are and are not allowed in the network. So what you can see is OpenBTS, when a phone comes onto the network, it will send a SIP register message to SIP Offserve. Who will then decide if that user should or should not be accepted by the network? And then return a message to OpenBTS saying, hey, accept them or don't accept them. So this is the way to do control of your network and who is and isn't allowed in. Next piece is SMQ. So this is a replacement for the SMSC, the short message service center. This is the thing that routes SMS effectively. It's usually spent a piece of equipment, but we have a really simple one that just takes SIP messages, which is what we've converted SMS into, and then routes them and returns them to users. So this does stable storage of SMSes in case of a user not being online at that time. It'll wait a couple of days to keep trying to deliver the message until they arrive online. Here you can see the SQ Lite subscriber registry. And this is the actual physical database that stores what users are where. Lastly, and probably most importantly, is FreeSwitch. So FreeSwitch is a SIP switch. This does all routing in the network. So messages come in, and actually SIP invites are called SIP messages or SMSs. The coming to FreeSwitch and FreeSwitch is able to via a thing called a dial plan and a chat plan route all the SMS to the appropriate places. You'll see some examples of this later. So we're going to talk a little bit about how to install one of these systems, and then we'll start doing some walkthroughs. So all of this is detailed online, and there's a bunch of wiki links, and I'm pretty sure this material will be available online later, and you'll be able to look at this. So these are the requirements to run OpenBTSR, a Linux PC with a USB 2 link, and a software-defined radio capable of supporting OpenBTS. This is a range networks RAD1. This is a couple of things that are universal hardware device compatible radios. This is Edis, USRP, and the FairWaves MTRX, which you'll see pictured up. So here's the range networks RAD1. This is really like a carrier-grade version of OpenBTS. Super high-quality radio. You can buy a desktop dev kit from them for about $2,000. To be complete disclosure, I am currently an employee of range networks. So I'm going to try not to pitch them too hard, but it's really good hardware. Or you can buy a 5150 base station, which is what we did for Papua. We actually took out the internals and put it in the box and changed the software and all this. But that's about $10,000 to $15,000. So this is how much it costs for a commercial carrier-grade thing. FairWaves is a competitor. This is Alexander Chamaris. Similar high-quality radio. Cheaper dev kit, but the dev kit doesn't come with some stuff. But either way, you can take this plug it into your laptop and run OpenBTS without a problem. And they sell a similar full-scale base station macro cell for some amount of money. I've never priced them up. Lastly, if you really wanted to roll your own base station, there's the Edis radios. So these are generally low quality because they're generic software radios. They're not really designed for GSM, but they're super cheap. It's $700 for a radio. You take this thing, plug it into your laptop, and you can have a network that covers a room pretty easily. Scaling it up farther is pretty hard, like getting to a full-size macro cell off of one of these. But it's a really great desktop test case. Lastly, here at Berkeley, we are now building our own base stations. So both the RAD-1 and the MTRX radios are open hardware. And so we're manufacturing those and sourcing a lot of the other parts ourselves in support of a project with the University of the Philippines. And we're expecting to be able to put together a high-quality full-size base station for about $2,000 cost of materials and build. So the core point here is that there's some competition in this market and the prices are going down. So that $10,000 spot for a base station is just going to get cheaper and cheaper. So I think I'm going to skip the build demo, although I'll show you, I need the screen share now. I'll at least show you the website. Because the build demo is mostly like things get built. But here's the openBTS.org website, which all you should go to. And if you wanted to get started, you go to get started. And then there's this whole big walkthrough on all this stuff. I'm the author of most of this. Well, that's not this page. But there is a lot of documentation. And it's always out of date, but you can come and make some progress. If you wanted to do the build install run, we have a whole website for that. You can see a similar diagram, although this one doesn't have free switch, detailing how to build for specific radios, how to connect things, and what you'll expect to see. Similarly, we at Berkeley have produced this website, which is also linked at the end of the talk, which is basically packaged a lot of this stuff to easy installation. Right now, it's 64-bit Linux Debian packages that are available. But if you install all of these, you should just have a working base station out of the box. It assumes an edis radio, though. So all of this is available here. I remember where I'm in my deck. Okay, so now we're going to show the running of one of these base stations. And you can see some stuff here. You can see me running SIP Officer. It's kind of weird, because I can't see any chat anymore, so I just have to assume everything's going well. No, don't pause. Stop sharing. Okay, there's no complaints, so I'm going to continue. That's sharing. Okay. So you can see us running SIP Officer here. Similarly, we're running SMQ here. And lastly, we're running OpenBTS. So we'll go to the OpenBTS command line interface. You shouldn't see the slides. You should see my terminal right now. There's no slides. So we're trying to run this demo. So a couple of things to note about one of these networks. This is a running cell phone network sitting in my room right now. The first thing I want to show you is TimC. Oh, that's not good. Anyway, so what you can see here are these numbers. So these are all of the phones that I've tried to attach to my base station. So the way the cellular works is you turn on your cell phone network and phones basically just try to attach to the network. And I wanted to point out these numbers here, 46001. So this is the TimC. This is the unique identifier for your SIM card. And this actually tells you what country the SIM is from. So we're going to do a little walk through here. So it's 46001 and 466. So if we go to the Wikipedia for mobile network code that I'm supposed to have it open. We've got 46001. You can see that's China and China Unicom, 46001. And this is what I'm supposed to be. This is actually configurable option in OpenVTS. So if we do config, you'll see that we're broadcasting as 4600, which means the base station is saying it's in China. And we're broadcasting as 01, which means we say we're Chinese Unicom. So this 46692 we're going to take a look at. That one's kind of interesting. So that's a Taiwan SIM card. It was 46692 Chung-Wa network, which is operational. So basically I ran this at my lab last night and someone's Taiwanese cell phone tried to connect to my base station. So that's a little bit of stuff in practice. So now I'm going to make a call on the network using my phone. And I hope it doesn't create too much white noise. So now I have a call going and you can see that. So there's a couple interesting things to note here. This one, the SDCCH, means that someone is trying to attach to the tower right then. So it doesn't have an identifier attached and it's a little bit farther away than my tower. No, it's not anyone. They got rejected. But this one here is a traffic channel that's ongoing. And you can see the relative power of the call going on and the amount of decibels. So this is an ongoing call on network. So basically this is a brief demonstration of this being a real network. So what we did here at Berkeley is we built a thing called the Village Base Station. It was really supposed to make it easier to build one of these networks. And I'm going to speed up a little bit because I'm running out of time. So this is available here at our GitHub. Basically we've added all of these features right here to the I'll plan in Pre-Switch. I'll show you an example of a Pre-Switch file plan. So these are database gets and sets that let you ask questions of the subscriber. You can ask for a user's location, you can log some stuff. You can generate a new user in the system, parse an SMS, send an empty SMS, send SMS, or wake up the base station, which is when the base station goes to sleep. So an example of that would be here. We'll go to see a chat plan. Here's an example of service in our system, the credit transfer. Actually let's do billing check. So billing check comes in and what it says is that if this user sent an SMS to 888, what we're going to do is send them back an SMS telling them what their balance is on the network. The VVTS account balance. And if you go back earlier, you can see where we set that particular variable. Here's account balance. We actually get it from the database. Ask for account balance, where name is their username. Similarly, 889 does the same thing by returning their phone number. These are some examples of small services in the network. Here's an echo service. If you send an SMS to 919, it will actually just return your original text back to you, things like this. And so if you get to a more complicated service, we'll say the credit transfer service, which is here. You can actually hand it off entirely to a whole other script that you wrote. So this is not part of the normal platform. We just wrote a credit transfer service and we handed some variables and it does some stuff. You can write fully custom applications. One quick example of that, which is SMSWall, which is our SMS mailing list. Here's our SMS mailing list. And if you look at the one script to run SMSWall, basically just parse this stuff and hand it to this SMSWall who then maintains their own database and stores messages and sends them around. So I'm running a long time. So at the end of this, that's basically what you need. If you come look at these websites, you get yourself a radio. Come and look at these websites. You'll be able to install and build a similar thing. All of our system in Papua, which includes all of those services and credit transfer and a full-featured system environment is available on our GitHub as open source. So feel free to contact me if this is interesting to you and we can help you use some of it. The packaging stuff, we're extremely excited to get out there and we'd be really happy to walk you through some of that. The last thing I want to say before we end is that all of this technical talk is important, but there's a huge piece of actually running these networks, which is social. And these are questions like, who makes decisions about the network? For our Burning Man Network, this is the Burning Man team. And we made decisions about the network for the whole Burning Man community. In Oaxaca, they do a cooperative. They come together as a meeting and talk with the community. And in our network in Papua, we handed control over to the missionary school and the wireless intercept service provider who provides technical support. They decided on pricing all of these things. But this is just as important as what services are on the network because you want someone who's part of the community to come in and make these decisions that are right for the community. A second question you want to ask are how are network credits distributed? This man is a man named Adit who did credit selling in our network in Papua. So things got really complicated because he got busy. He's a teacher at the school. So he handed it to the husband of another teacher who was staying home with the baby. But then the church didn't want that guy selling credits on church land. And so now Adit sells credits to people in the community who run stores who then sell credits to users. So we had to build up this whole piece of human infrastructure to do credit selling in our network. And the network wouldn't work without these people participating. All of them take a cut on all the credit sales. And lastly, of course, what happens when something breaks? Although our network has been sitting in that tree for about a year now without any huge problems, we made sure to give the operators just a switch so that if something breaks, they can turn it off. There were problems with the copier and with the internet. And so they would turn off our network to do basic science to say, is our network causing a problem? Of course it wasn't. But it let them believe that. And then if the network would ever break, they just turn it off and turn it on again. Giving them that amount of control was hugely important. Similarly, if we actually had a hard drive failure or anything like that, these are two technical people who work with the wireless internet service provider who could go up in the tree, take out the hard drive, replace the hard drive stuff like that. You need to be able to solve that question if you're going to run a real community seller in a network. All right, so I'm out of time. You can find out more on all these websites. This one is the dev one is the Debian packages I was talking about. Rainy Public is the public Wiki, OpenBTS is that main website, tier.cs is of course our research groups website and my own personal website. So I'm happy to handle any questions now. Thanks for sitting and listening to all of it. Thank you so much, Curtis. You've really managed to get a lot of information into the presentation and very impressive rattling off of the website at the end there. So some questions have already come in. And I would like to encourage our listeners if you have questions to please enter them in the Q&A window. But we'll kick off with our first question, which is, from the smartphone user's perspective, how does a user of Verizon or AT&T's iPhone get connected to an open VTS cell to make or receive calls, SMS messages or a text? So GSM is really nice in that the way that it's designed is you put a SIM card in and your phone should go. So in our networking platform we have special SIM cards that are sold and you put one in your phone and you go. Now in the US and a couple of other countries this could be trickier. The phones could be SIM locked, which is where they're locked to a specific provider, in which case then the other SIM cards wouldn't work. So your iPhone is usually SIM locked nowadays, if I remember correctly. I haven't used an iPhone since 3G. But that's, past that, you put the SIM card in and it connects to the network. So it gets a little more complicated if you try to do it without changing the SIM card because technically open VTS can handle your phone attaching, as you saw the Taiwan phone that tried to attach to my network. But usually you have to change the SIM card or there's actually some options. If you go into settings you can change it and actually manually select the network. Very cool. So another question is regarding the system and whether you've considered using a band that ham radio operators use and will cell phones work at those frequencies? Yeah, they won't. We've built a small thing which would do up-scaling and down-scaling of the frequency so that we could take GSM and put it into that band and then on the phone attach a piece of hardware which would step it from the ham band to the GSM band. But the big reason to do it in GSM is that there's literally tens of billions of phones on Earth and all of those sit in four GSM bands at most. Usually they just sit in two. And so none of them listen on the ham band and so ham just doesn't work. The phones don't support it. Next are questions. I'm going to roll them together and these are around operational costs. So one of our listeners wants to know that the $2,000 price that you quoted is the hardware like the pole and the electronics. And attached to that I'm going to ask the question of in both Oaxaca and Papua if you have to pay for the government for the licensing. So if you maybe can give a little bit more insight as to the comprehensive costs around the system. So it doesn't include the pole. I guess it does include the pole. If we count the pole, it's literally the pole we put up in Papua. We found that. That was pretty technically. And of course the electronics. We're trying to get it to be as inclusive as we can. The tricky part of the hardware really is stuff like power and network. If we include those, the price point is probably more like $5,000 to $10,000. But for the base station itself and all the equipment required for the base station, assuming you can power a network, it's too grand we think we can do. As far as spectrum license, we actually don't have one in Papua. The Oaxaca network has one and we had one at Burning Man. The Oaxaca network and the Burning Man network both have special temporary licenses which have their own limitations primarily that they're usually not allowed to generate a profit. So in our experience in rural areas, there's very little spectrum regulation. And so these sort of solutions are actually somewhat sustainable. But at Berkeley, one of the things we're working at is trying to put together a comprehensive way to regulate networks like this. We think that at the end of the day as the price point in these networks drops, you're going to have to regulate them effectively. They're going to be like Wi-Fi routers. You can't just come in and say these networks are illegal because they're so useful and they solve so many problems that people are going to take that risk to provide coverage for themselves. And so we need a regulatory framework to deal with it. We're proposing a solution we're calling GSM Whitespace which is basically we built a cognitive base station that could come in and scan the frequency band and make sure that it's not interfering with anyone else's network and all of this. So that's what we're building right now. And we're hoping to get some traction with that with regulators. But that's still in the future. It's definitely a big problem. Regulation is the biggest problem for this model right now. I'm just going to pull on that thread a little bit. True to you, institution working with and developing these kinds of regulation, governing bodies or kind of development bodies of any sort. Did you ask who we're interested in working with? Who do you envision being ideal partners and working with to develop these regulatory schemes? Yeah, I think regulators are the answer. They've been tasked with the job of providing a rural coverage. And the only solution they have right now are universal service obligations because those are limited. Like I know a place in the U.S. that don't have coverage, right? And this is ostensibly one of the most powerful countries on earth. And I know of people who live in areas of that cell phone coverage. And so this is entirely a regulatory problem. And so the FCC or similar bodies are the people who should solve it. And I think that telcos aren't going to be all together open to having their spectrum used by other people. And so we can provide arguments to say, hey, this is actually going to benefit you. It's going to build a market in that community. But they're making a ton of money right now, so they'd rather just not shake the boat. We think regulators are the best answer. We're, of course, happy to talk to anyone who's interested in piloting any of this technology. We've been in contact with both the regulators and firms in the Philippines as a target for us. And we're continuing to talk with, again, both all over the world. Very interesting. So another question came in, a request for you to talk a little bit more about the role of your own hardware project at UC Berkeley, perhaps expand on what you've already introduced to us. So, yeah, the big idea is that we have this grant with the University of the Philippines and the Philippine government. And one thing they want to do is stimulate local business, like business in the Philippines, and like semiconductor stuff and stuff like that. So we've been tasked with being able to put together a base station that could be produced entirely in the Philippines. And so we're taking the open hardware and we are doing duplexes, like finding duplexes and finding power amplifiers and all this stuff to be able to source a base station entirely on our own. And that's where we're really sitting at this role, your own base station stuff, because as academics we're going to document this process. So that should allow other people to come in and build a similar system based on those findings. So it's not a lot of rocket science, right? These are open hardware designs and then you plug a bunch of pieces into it. But the goal is to actually have done that and demonstrate the price point. I think we're getting closer. We have another question that's come in. I apologize because I'm not sure if I'm going to pronounce this correctly. S-S-E-T-T-U-S-U-S-R-P for development testing or experimentation in Y-C cause interference with existing cell services? No, almost certainly not. So those are extremely low power radios. You need to be a little bit careful with a couple things. The biggest one is this configuration variable called open registration. And what you can do is set it so that it will reject certain SIM cards or any SIM card that doesn't match a certain identity. And then you'll be almost totally fine because the networks are so small that it won't really cause any congestion. Now I'm not a lawyer and you may or may not be writing a particular law on that term, but I've run networks in New York and not had any really interference problems with other people. You know, put an attenuator on it, put a small antenna on it and it's not going to go more than a dozen feet and you'll be fine. It's a reasonable test bed situation. And last of all, operate in a basement and you're totally fine. Cool. And a really pertinent question, a timely question. Considering your work, extensive work on the Philippines, did the typhoon have any impact on your setup there? Yeah, absolutely. I mean things are completely on hold. Some of the UP campuses have been like completely demolished as far as I understand. And so they're really focusing less on, of course, academic research and more on basic functioning right now. And so all that stuff is put on hold until things get settled. And we are seeing what we can do here at Berkeley to help them. And obviously we're working on these autonomous radio solutions and right now they've lost connectivity in a bunch of places. So it seems like we just missed, you know, this fantastic technology for this horrible problem they've had and we just weren't ready yet. Because, you know, in another year they'd have a bunch of these radars that they could put them out and provide connectivity and people could communicate with their families and all these things. So I don't know, it bothers me that we missed that because there's so many people who need help right now. So yeah, it's definitely on hold and it's much to our chagrin. Naturally, for those of you who are listening and would like to help, I just wanted to give a shout out to interaction.org. Interaction also has a list currently of trusted organizations where you can donate that are helping with type 1 activities on all fronts, whether it's from rebuilding housing or providing modern sanitation solutions. So really do take a look if you have an opportunity and donate whatever you can to help folks out in rebuilding. It's interactionalloneword.org. So a few more questions have come in. You're generating quite a discussion here. Someone would like to know what you mean by full scale BTS. What is the coverage distance for open BTS? And did you ever consider a mesh for community networks? Yeah, full-sided base station. There's just some technical terms. I mean, people may be heard of Pico cells and Micro cells. These are like small base stations for rooms. And I'm basically saying not that. This is a full macro base station kind of thing that gets put on a building. And it has the exact same coverage as any other macro base station. The spec says about 35 kilometers is the maximum. You don't really see that. I would say older 10 kilometers maximum. Our network in Papua, we see maximum of 5 kilometers and a minimum of a half a kilometer because we're right up into a wall, like a mountain. And so geography plays a huge role obviously in any spectrum propagation models and so on. But 5 to 10 kilometers line of sight is pretty reasonable for one of these installations. And as far as mesh, in our experience, I mean, we did consider mesh, I guess, is the answer. And we don't think it's a good solution to the problem for a variety of reasons. First, mesh is not particularly good at handling voice traffic for some spectrum utilization reasons. Like Shadi has this wonderful paper. If you go to the TO website, you'll see it on some of the limitations of mesh networks for a lot of things. That's on descent networks and the limitations in that context. But some of them apply as well. Another re-property of this is centralized failure. Like if we build a mesh in Papua, none of the local houses have power. And so we'll have to power n nodes where n is the number of houses or something. And then each one of those individual power solutions has its own failure model. Rather, we've centralized as much of the failure as possible. So if the hydro goes down, the base station goes down, and that's it. That's the only failure that can happen there. Or if the network goes down, the base station goes down. So we really simplified a lot of the failure modes in order to make this thing sustainable and work. Yeah, I guess that's probably my answer to that question. Some of the mesh stuff is interesting. Mesh potato, the village telco, the projects. We just think that this is a lot simpler from a management and sustainability model, which is really important in these rural areas. I couldn't agree with you more. And I guess to your point regarding the fact that you have limited human resources, you know, individuals who are able to troubleshoot the system requires you to ensure that minimizing those failure modes is a part of the overall requirement. So this is going to be the last question as we are a minute out from ending our webinar. And that is a very practical question. What data rates are typically available for the smartphone from OpenBTS? Yeah, so OpenBTS right now supports 2.5G, which is just GPRS. In practicality, I think that's like tens of kilobytes a second. Range Networks has released a 3G product, which will support more. It's still built off of some of the same core, but it's no longer open source. Because 3G networks take a lot of money. And 3G networks are really patent-encumbered. So it will be really hard to have an open 3G implementation. But tens of kilobytes is the right answer. It's not a huge thing. And so you won't be able to do any of the sort of modern big phone web browser-y stuff on one of those. But it's more than sufficient for most use cases, especially in the developing world, where maybe it's email or Facebook or things like that. Facebook. It's critical everywhere. So thank you to Indeed. Thank you to Curtis. Thank you so much for spending time with us, for obviously providing a tremendous amount of information in just an hour. And I'd like to thank all of the participants for hanging out with us today. For those of you who are interested in getting your professional development hours, please use the code that is currently listed on the screen and send an email to eab-cuadmin.itribally.org to get your certificates. And if you have more questions that we didn't tackle today or would like to get in touch with Curtis, please feel free to email us at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. We look forward to catching up with you on our next webinar in December. And thank you again, Curtis, and thank you everyone. Have a great morning, afternoon, or evening, wherever you may be. Take care.