 Just a word of warning, my slides and myself, on average, will keep pace with one another, but don't get too upset if the slides on myself are diverging in various ways. Both of them will cover all of the material by the end of the talk. So we're talking about the Serval project today, and just a word of introduction. The long title makes you feel like King Julian on Madagascar with a sort of, you know, self-proclaimed blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's pretty accurate actually, but it's a really good title for being able to talk to important people about what we're trying to do, which is to get telecommunications anywhere, anytime, in disaster, in peacetime, in remote locations, in areas where bushfire is a problem and communications goes down, and all of these things. So let's start having a look through. The genesis for this project was, in fact, the Haiti earthquake. So this time last year, it would take a couple of weeks, there was the big earthquake in Haiti. And I still remember hearing on the news, I think it was driving in the car and it was on the radio, and there was this comment that said that, you know, they're having trouble getting aid in and getting everything sorted out, because, you know, the airport was out except for one runway, and that was being managed by air traffic control from on the continental USA with a very low traffic rate, because it actually nearly had to relief aid planes crash, which was, I think that would have caused a few risk assessments to get filled out. So getting aid in by air was actually really problematic for them. And I thought, roads, oh, that's right, earthquakes are really, really good at messing roads up in a really big way. And indeed they did. And I thought, okay, well, you get a filthy, great big container ship and you fill it up with bananas or whatever it is people need after an earthquake, and, you know, you come into the harbor and you offload it and kind of, you know, you hand stuff out to everyone and, you know, it'll get there eventually. The harbor was actually ruined as well. So there's kind of this, and I still remember the tension of that, that here was this group of people who were desperately poor and had very little capacity for resilience themselves compared to, for example, us here in Australia, and we've had the flooding here in Brisbane recently and that's been a terrible thing. But to see the immense effort that's been marshaled and the way that, you know, restoration has happened and the cleanup has happened so quickly. Because the peak of the floods was, what, a week and a half, two weeks ago now? And, okay, our mobile phones are behaving a little bit strangely around here. But it was about this long before people could even reliably make a voice call in and around Haiti after the earthquake. Think about what that means for civil law and order. You know, if you're thinking of looting somewhere and you know that the authorities can't contact one another, you know, you're going to feel quite free about, you know, potentially just walking up with your car and loading TV sets or doing whatever you like. And that's, that's the pretty end of it. There were reports of rape gangs and all sorts of other really, really, really nasty unsavory stuff going on because civil law and order was not in a robust state. And I just had this sense that, you know, this should never happen again. There's no reason why communications needs to be so dependent on infrastructure. Infrastructure gives us some great advantages, but it should not be so dependent on it. And so disaster was the, the genesis. But very quickly, it occurred to me that while disaster was one clear application, the other is actually, you know, anywhere where the mobile phone service either is completely missing or quite patchy. Perhaps, you know, hilly geography causes a lot of problems. And in fact, if you look, you know, like Papua New Guinea is a good example of a very hilly country with a relatively low GDP. So you get this problem of, well, how can you actually provide coverage to everyone? And even if you manage it, think how much it costs to run a cell tower. You know, here in, you know, wealthy Australia, there's a reasonable cost to it. But think for a minute, there's an estimate that was talking about this in Africa and they estimated the cost at running a cell phone tower in Africa to be a quarter of a million dollars a year. You think, goodness gracious me, how on earth can it cost that much to run a cell phone tower? But think about it. You know, you've got this tower and there's no power around. So you go, okay, we'll put a diesel generator next to it and you want it to be able to run for, I don't know, a week or two between having to go out into the middle of nowhere to drop fuel in. So you put a nice big diesel tank next to it. And then you suddenly go, hang on a minute, the people that live around here earn, perhaps, you know, two to five dollars a day. It's more than worth their while to think of incredibly ingenious ways to extract diesel out of the tank, or in fact, actually extract your cell tower out of the place where you put it. I remember hearing in Papua New Guinea that they were trying to relay, this was some number of years back, telephone cables along the Highlands somewhere. And they were busy laying copper at this end. And then kind of at the other end, the locals are actually digging up the copper and selling it for scrap value because, you know, four dollars a kilo for scrap value for copper and they might have only been earning two dollars a day. There's a big economic problem in developing countries in terms of, you know, distorted economies and distorted incentives by putting big infrastructure in. But let's imagine for a minute that you can do all of that. So you put your tower and you put, you know, a motor round at the drawbridge or whatever you need to protect it. And then you put big lights on it to protect that. And then you have a big data link and cameras and all of this stuff that makes it cost a quarter of a million dollars a year. And you're, excellent. How many subscribers roughly can we get on that tower? And what it basically boils down to is that every subscriber is paying about six dollars a month for the use of that tower. So, you know, on average, everyone kind of has a tower so we can think about it in that way. So you go, hang on a minute, they're earning two dollars a day and the telco is going to charge money for the rest of the network and for the calls that you actually make on the network. So my understanding is in Africa, the cost is around about 12 to 15 dollars a month that people are typically paying for mobile coverage. That is a very large amount of money. So in fact, this is a whole other situation of not people who have no phone coverage, but people who have a phone and have cellular coverage. But it's more a status symbol than it actually is something that actually helps them because they can't afford to make phone calls. There are countries in Africa where looking at the statistics, a day's workers are labourable, earn you enough money to make, guess how many SMS messages? Slightly better, eight. Eight SMS messages. Or you might like to eat or pay your rent or buy clothes or do a whole pile of other interesting things that, you know, are arguably, you know, part of a balanced life. So there's a problem and the only real solution to that is to get away from big infrastructure because even if big enterprise wants to be friendly, while independent on big infrastructure, there will be big costs involved. So this is one of the things that we've set out to work around. And very early in the process, we're actually very happy we learned about the Village Telco project who have been doing mesh fixed line telephony and we have some of the people in the audience here, including from Dilly and East Timor, where they're actually deploying this. And local calls are valuable. And I wish I could remember where on earth I read the statistic, but I remember reading that 80% of phone calls are less than four kilometers in distance. And when you think about it, you go, yeah, actually that makes sense. You know, you do the occasional absurdly long phone call, but in reality it's kind of the, you know, shall I get bread on the way home? You know, shall we catch up at the pub? Or, you know, all of these sorts of things. And they're typically very short distance phone calls. And what Village Telco have found is that this actually adds tremendous value to communities. So that was kind of where we started thinking and that very much informed how we thought about what we're doing. And in particular with adding the disaster side to it, we came up with three very nice simple assumptions, which are best described with pictures. This is our assumption of logistical convenience and available infrastructure. The system should be able to work on the far side of the moon. Because if it can work there, it can work in any context here on earth. Now it should be able to make use of better infrastructure if it's available, but it must be able to operate in complete isolation without bringing anything new into the area. Because when you think about Haiti, that was exactly the situation that they were facing. And as you people sometimes sort of say, well, why didn't they use satellite phones? Like once the Red Cross everyone poured in, they tried. You know how big a GSM cell is? Maybe order of kilometers to tens of kilometers across and it could probably have, I don't know, maybe a thousand phone calls in progress at a time. And the satellite providers won't give you exact details, but my understanding is that the core density factors are reasonably similar, say a thousand calls per cell. Now if your cell tower is in low earth orbit or worse still in geosynchronous orbit, 50,000 kilometers above, think how big that cell is on the ground that can support a thousand simultaneous calls. It's probably going to be hundreds of kilometers across. That basically would have meant that all of Port-au-Prince, and in fact probably all of Haiti would be in one cell. Not surprisingly, the NGOs had trouble even phoning each other over the satellite network as it was getting glued up. So we have to be able to work without infrastructure. The second assumption is about user knowledge and user trainability. And here's a nice painting from, I don't know, how long ago. But I can be reasonably confident in saying that this person probably will have limited ability to learn new ways to use the tools that they already have available to them. So in our context that means it has to just work like an ordinary phone. When it goes into mesh mode, you shouldn't need to go into settings and mess with interfaces and do all that kind of stuff. It must just work. And that actually leads into the third assumption, which is actually a really critical one, the telephone directory. The telephone directory is fixed. Here in fact actually is the first telephone directory in the world, 1878. In a disaster, imagine for a minute that this project is successful and we managed to get ourselves a Hercules C-130 and fly over the next disaster. Think how many mobile phones you could fit in the back of a Hercules C-130. And so you fly over and do the drop and all these phones that have float to the ground with cute little parachutes on there and maybe a little solar panels so you can keep them charged. And you go, excellent, I've got a phone. How do I contact other people that have got these other phones around here? Because this phone has a new number and their phone has a new number. Neither person can actually contact the other person until they actually find them physically. And then you go, isn't the phone a touch superfluous? So you must be able to use existing phone numbers. And this is perhaps one of the key innovations that we've done, other than actually make mesh telephony actually work for mobile phones. So let's have a think then again about this mesh network structure. It has to be self-organising, as we've said, it has to just work. It has to do everything. It has to be wireless. I think that probably is a reasonably self-evident statement. Sort of wandering around a disaster zone with them or in anywhere really with the large wires hanging around is just not going to work. And then we have this third point that people must be able to claim their own phone number. Now remember, this has to be able to work on the far side of the moon or indeed in a completely isolated disaster zone. That means that you can't rely on carrier support. And what actually goes so far as to say with this technology that carrier support, particularly for people in remote areas as compared to disaster areas is going to be very hard to get because there's actually no incentive for the carrier to cooperate by providing some kind of phone number lookup thing and they still need infrastructure to tie it in and they're going to charge for it. And it's all going to be a bit of a mess. And by the time they get the acting to give chances of the disaster will be finished and everyone will have moved somewhere else and who knows what else. So we have to have self-claiming of your own phone numbers or indeed self-issuing of your own phone numbers if you're in a Greenfields area. So that's a wonderful and you go authentication. What's there to stop me claiming your phone number or you claiming my phone number or someone Bin Laden claiming the Pope's phone number or a whole variety of other inconvenient things that might you can just imagine some of the phone calls that might go on if you ended up with the wrong person on the end of some of these other people's phone calls. So authentication, what do we do about it? When you assume no infrastructure, it actually becomes really simple. There's not much you can do. But what you can do is like voicemail, you know, when you ring someone's phone and you hear the person talking and say, oh, look, you know, I'm not at my phone. You know, I'm really going to listen to your message really soon as soon as you leave your message after the beep. Let's just get people to record their own voice on the phone. And then they claim all the numbers that they want. And it might be actually that you only have one phone amongst the family in that situation. You can claim all the numbers for all of those phones and record all the voice signatures for all of those people. And then when someone tries to call in to those numbers, they'll actually hear a message on their phone saying the identity of this subscriber cannot be confirmed. But, you know, someone has claimed that number, you know, press one to hear them saying their name. And so you press it and it was saying Osama bin Laden or Paul Gardner, Stephen or whatever. And you go, yeah, that's that person saying their name. Our brains are fantastic things at discriminating these things. So let's do it with our brains rather than try and figure out some crazy piece of hardware to do it, particularly in a mobile phone where the power consumption of that is crazy. I'd much rather have more power consumption up here and eat another banana. And it's just more scalable. So that's basically what we've done. So, you know, it'll prompt you and you can go, yes, I want to connect or no, I don't want to connect. Now, if you tie it into infrastructure or if people get sufficient warning, then you can set up a web of trust to authenticate these things. So one vision I have is actually having the post office involved because again, I think the incentives for carriers to participate in this are either not there or in fact, there are actually disincentives, not so much real disincentives for their business model, but fear in the same way that DRM free music has caused fear in the music industry. But the reality actually we know is that the recording labels haven't gone broke. They're actually still absurdly profitable and life is actually quite happy. But there will be this fear. And so I think we have to assume that we won't have their cooperation, but I would love to have their cooperation if any would cooperate with us. So the subscriber IDs that we actually use in the system are actually public keys using elliptic curve cryptography. So the keys are nice and short, about 160 bits is as good as RSA 1024, something of that order. But much smaller. So it's easier for us to send around. So the post office can you can go in with a phone bill and some other ID and they can go, yes, Australia Post has high confidence that you are who you claim to be. Then when someone calls you on that phone, if they trust Australia Post to make these trust decisions, they will actually basically connect straight through. Or in fact, the second time you call someone, it can say, you spoke to this person last time. Are you happy that this is the real person? You can go, yes, and you can remember that decision for yourself. Or in fact, you could actually sign that person's key in a test that you believe that that person is who they say they are. And so you can kind of build up this nice level of trust. So this means that people can start communicating immediately after a disaster, even if they'll give a new phone. They claim their number, put the signature in and people can start calling each other and with a reasonable degree of trust. Basically, it's best effort authentication for a best effort network when the alternative is no authentication and no network. And I know if I was in a disaster across the situation, I'd much rather a nonzero probability of getting the person I wanted to talk to rather than a zero probability. So I just I make this statement that, you know, do not underestimate the value of letting people claim their own phone number. And in the long term it will have profound effects in terms of freeing up communications and enabling individuals and communications to actually individuals in communities rather to solve their own communication needs and without excessive public purse or requiring big infrastructure and big enterprise. Progress to date. The first funding we had for this project was actually from the wonderful Orson Foundation. The Orson Foundation for the Arts and Sciences owe that all grants were like the Orson Foundation. I still remember it went to their website and it goes, oh, apply for grant. Click web form. And it says something along the lines of, you know, put in your awesome idea that you would like us to give you a thousand dollars to pursue, but keep it less than 500 words because their attention spans are short, which is a completely honest, unlike many government schemes where they claim to take a lot of effort. But actually if you talk to people that assess these grants, they're actually not that interested and they get tired very quickly. But it took six minutes to fill out and six days later I had a thousand dollars. Compare that to the Australian Research Council that takes effectively 18 months for you to start getting money. And in the meantime, we spent some absurd amount of time trying to fill out the paperwork. And there are reasons for that because it's public money and all these sorts of things, but oh, that things would be nicer. Then we had a successful trial up in the outback at the Arcarola Wilderness Sanctuary. It was a fantastic day. I've never charted an aeroplane before. It was great fun and we basically proved that this technology works. So for those who aren't familiar with Arcarola where it is, it is kind of it's sort of two thirds of the way up in South Australia, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It's in some mountainous country. The nearest cell coverage is probably like 100 or 130 kilometers away. And that's basically for like a couple of mining towns. It really is a desolate country, very beautiful desolate country though. So we proved that, got it into the media. And the media is actually a really interesting way to publish. I mean, officially I work at a, well, I do work at a university and I need to publish journal papers and things. And I have published some papers. But you get nothing like the response compared to using the media. So we're on ABC News locally and we're also on the new inventors. And then we had inquiries coming out of our ears from very respectable organizations that we are excited to partner with. So we've had, you know, NGOs talk to us about using this in, you know, disaster deployments. We've had local communities saying our mobile phone coverage is terrible and, you know, we've asked carriers to improve it. But they basically say, you know, it's not worth their while. And a whole pile of other things, you know, country fire services that are concerned about being able to be in contact with their people. We actually had a very interesting conversation with the Australian Red Cross as well. And they said during the Victorian bushfires, and I was flabbergasted when I heard this, they lost contact with crews for three days in the midst of the bushfires. Do you think the Red Cross were worried? Do you think the people's families were worried? You mentioned the people that were actually out in the field were probably actually also quite anxious as well knowing that they hadn't been in contact and that people would be wondering about their safety. That should never happen. Should never happen again. And that's one of the things that, you know, this technology can work to. I mean, if, for example, on their vehicles, you could have a low-cost satellite link and all of the people that are working around that vehicle. And the same goes for the fire services as well with the mesh phones. They can be reporting GPS location. And you know, you can know in real time where people are and be in contact and calls that don't need to go over the satellite won't go over the satellite because satellite calls cost a fortune. We've also made phone calls from underground as we did a couple of weeks ago to just simply to prove that it could be done. So we went into a cave up by the River Murray. We went about 88 metres underground. Bizarrely, it's a six metre long log in this cave. Like we've gone round corners and over boulders and stuff. And I can just happily sit on this log and make a phone call. It was very strange but very cool. And the most recent work that we've done that was actually done about a week and a half ahead of the conference. So it's been very convenient timing is that we've got our PST and gateway working so that you can have a mobile phone that has our mesh software on it. And if just one of those phones gets in contact with a 3G data network, it can connect all of the other mesh phones to the public telephone network. So if for example you have a cell tower that goes out, I think, hopefully, even have a picture. So here on the left, perhaps I should have drawn a bit of water under the cell tower on the left would have been an accurate situation for several towers here in Brisbane in recent weeks. And we've got a couple of phones there on the ground that if we didn't have our phone literally tied to a balloon that could see another cell tower further away either behind an obstruction or just simply greater distance, those phones would have no coverage. But because one of our phones does have coverage, it can then provide it out over the mesh. What's really interesting is you don't need to do anything to any of these phones. As soon as one of them gets in range, we're talking about not needing to train people to do new tricks. The phone just works and it goes, yep, I can see the global telephone network and it will advertise that to the mesh phones transparently and when they attempt to dial a number and again using someone's ordinary phone number, if it's not available on the mesh, it will make the call out to the public switch network. And similarly, we can set up a system to allow the calls to come back in. So we should be demonstrating this at lunchtime down at the, there's an oval down the bottom if you head down Hill Road, which is kind of outside a little bit and then it turns into Boundary Road that's an oval on the right-hand side. During lunch, we're actually going to literally tie a mobile phone to a helium balloon, raise it up 50 meters and we have a number of phones that have no SIM cards in them at all. So they cannot use the cellular network directly. They will form a mesh, they'll find the phone that can see the cellular network and will be able to call anywhere in the world with those phones. And I encourage as many of you to come down and have a look at that and even have a go with the phones and deplete my VoIP balance in the process. But that might be a little bit tricky. Calling a satellite phone would cost a lot of money and I don't want to spend that much money. But we'll be able to do it. And that's going out to the public switch network. If there was another mesh somewhere in the world, then we can set the gateway up so that that doesn't go through the public switch network, it just goes over the internet. And in that situation, the call would either be free or very, very cheap indeed. So let's have a think about this from an overhead view. So again, we're here, we're modeling the dead cell kind of idea. So purple links are mesh links and green links are cellular links. So we can see there's a number of the pretty colored cells are the ones that are still working. And we can see all the phones connect back to a central point in each cell, which is the tower. And then in the dead cell, the phones that are near enough the edge can kind of go, oh, I can see another mesh enabled phone. And so we have a whole pile of phones acting as gateways in this situation. And they'll kind of tie into the mesh and they'll try and offer their various gateway services. But as you can see, there's a couple of phones that they're not near enough to any other phone in a live cell. So those two people can call each other, but they can't call anyone else. So that's where we add in either a phone tied to a balloon or it could just be a phone in a higher location or simply just adding more phones in on the ground. And anyone can do it. You don't have to kind of... Who's actually tried using a femto cell? Has anyone tried using a femto cell to provide boosted coverage with the network? And with femto cells, you have to basically... This thing has to get a GPS fix and the whole cellular network has to know where it is because GSM uses neighboring cell lists. And it's really interesting. It's a limiting factor with femto cells. The lists are actually finite length. You only have so many femto cells in an area before it starts messing with the operation of the network. But we digress slightly. So here we have sufficient phones to get coverage in from another cell and provide coverage in there. So this is all wonderful. Now what happens now if... Whatever the disaster suddenly... Oops! All of the cells are now dead. Maybe they've run out of battery or... This is more like what would have been in Haiti in the immediate hours before they started getting towers back up. Or indeed, this is a developing situation where there's no coverage to begin with or a remote location. So now, we'll assume that we still have the balloon there but of course it will work without that. So now the machine is going the other way. The phones that previously were providing the coverage are now actually receiving support from the other phones. And everyone can still call locally without it touching any outside infrastructure. But if we then add in, for example, an NGO might come in and put a big ant terminal and my phone box complete works anywhere, mobile phone network in a box here. There you go. That's about 400 kilobits per second up and down. The satellite terminal, about $1,500, makes fun beeping noises while you're pointing at the satellite. Very easy to deploy in the field. And battery powered too, so you don't have to worry about having mains. So one of those tied to one of these, a Village Telco mesh potato with our gateway software on it, is all you need to tie in the mesh network to the global phone network and to the internet via a single satellite link. Everyone else using their phones just suddenly go, oh, I can make calls again. And I'll probably clog the network up because it's two people trying to make calls at the same time, but they'll hopefully at least be able to get SMS through and then there's everyone settles down and everything normalizes, it's fine. Or other people might put more satellite links in and we can actually spread the load out over multiple links. So it's quite scalable in a variety of ways. But of course, we've still got people and groups of people who don't have coverage here. So let's just add some more party balloons. Or phones on high points or whatever the solution is. It suddenly becomes mind numbingly simple to re-establish communications. And what's important is the people in the area can do it. You don't have to wait for the SES to turn up. You don't have to wait for the army to turn up with a Black Hawk helicopter and airdrop in a temporary phone tower. People can do this themselves, whether to relieve distress or to provide communications in areas where it previously didn't exist. Or that it exists but it's too expensive for people to use. And these are all good things, we think. Demo time. So we've got, I think I'm happy to be corrected, but I reckon I've probably bought the most mobile phone to this conference of anyone. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, sorry. Sure, that one, wasn't it? Should some more light on this here? Ah, look at that. And, okay. I took a photo last night after I turned the lights off where I was staying of all of the phones spread out in their chargers and the satellite thing charging. And it was like Christmas. So we're looking at city lights from on a hill. There was this lovely twinkling of different colored lights. So we're using G1s, the original Google developer phones, just because they're nice and easy for us to program. So I'll just turn a couple of these on. And what we will need at some point is someone who's willing for us to call them on their mobile phone. So I just need to make sure I turn on the one that only one of these has a SIM card. And it will, of course, be the last one I find because I'd be silly if I kept looking, wouldn't I? So just wait for the phones to start up. Do-do-do-do-do. So that obviously is a picture of me deep in a cave with one of our bat phones relaying the call in. And I'm actually holding a Telstra rental phone attached to a mesh potato and powered by batteries. So we can set too many cords in here. I did say wireless was a good idea, didn't I? Normal Wi-Fi writers, you plug a phone line into the wall in with a mesh potato, you plug a telephone handset in. Lithium polymer battery. Now this will run a mesh potato for about 24 hours. The mesh potato is designed nominally 12 volts, but in reality, I think about nine to 35 volts. David, is that about right? Yeah, nine to 35 volts. I believe you can put, yeah. It's designed to run on whatever you can. And if you accidentally put mains onto it, it tries to not blow up. They've put quite a lot of effort in and they've done some really good engineering work on that. So it's slightly bizarre. And we'll hand this around in a minute and everyone can listen to dial tone on a phone that's not plugged into anything. It's always quite freaky when you try it the first time. So that will get us self-organized in a minute. I'll just, when I do pass it around, it is a lithium polymer battery. Please don't poke holes in it or cause it to explode or short circuit or otherwise melt through the floor. Okay, so we're, this is the phone that has the 3G network. So they're prototype. So I just have to start our software. Once it was in a full production mode, no one would need to do that. Thinking, thinking, thinking. Not that you can actually see the phone from there anyway. So I'm not sure why I'm holding it up. And we've actually just been buying these phones second hand on eBay. We haven't done anything to the hardware at all. They're just standard G-1s. Okay, so that one's happily running. Someone can hold that and pretend it's their phone. There you go. Here, pretend it's your phone. Just make sure you don't press the thing and turn the mesh off. Cause that would ruin the demo. So I'll turn the mesh on on one of these phones. Now what I need, as I say, is for someone who's willing for me to ring them, we can, someone can, we'll dial your number in off camera so that we're not advertising the phone number to the whole world. Now if you actually want to wander out here, I'll just finish doing all the engineering things to make this work to begin with. There he has it. Now this is of course assuming that, that phone can actually get decent coverage in here. And the phone coverage here at the conference indoors has been quite spotty. Okay, but don't say your number. Just skip the first zero and start punching the rest of the digits in. Look, I'm sure there probably is. Okay, so there he has it. And this phone is actually in airplane mode as well and has no SIM. So, and people can come and examine that. All it's doing is meshing. It says it's dialing. This is encouraging. It thinks it's talking to the public switch phone network. You can talk into your phone. I'll put this on speaker phone, but the, oh, hang on, we have a, okay, let's, let's try this. Okay, put it on, on squeaker phone, but the, people making it slides against carrier performance here. Okay, try again. Three, yes. In practice, not today. You know, there's only so many things I can demo in one day. Okay, now that phone, if you can just press the thing, the wifi symbol in the middle of the display, might need, okay, let's, yes, that one. Okay, cool. So, we're now turning off the public switch phone network gateway. So, if I try and call that number again, so now there's no way out to the outside world. So, it'll say dialing, have a happy little dialing thing, and it should, in principle, give up within it. Yep, it's given up. It said it can't connect the call. So, it's proving, well, in a kind of way that that's what's happening. But we can, in fact, actually call other phones. So, I turned on another one here, and now we're really stretching the realms of probability that everything is going to behave for us. So, turning on another mesh phone. The other funky thing is, I'll tell you how many other mesh phones are in range as well. Can you see the IDs of the phones that are involved? Not at this stage, but we're actually, we're going to add to the graphical interface to add that kind of information. Because particularly, I mean, think about whether it's Red Cross or some other NGO. My feeling is that that would be a very helpful feature for them to have, so that if you're in an area, as you can display a map and see on the GPS where your team are, and you can get help from the nearest person, all of those sorts of, hundreds of really interesting things that we can do with this. So, let me, so now I'm calling this phone using its own phone number, and the mesh gateway is off to the public switch network, so this is purely mesh to mesh calling. And it's going to play hard to get with me. Let's try it again. You've got the gateway off over there? Still? Excellent. I will try calling the other way instead, just in case. Do, do, do, do, do. Oh, that might be part of the problem. I think these two phone numbers think they have the same number. Talking about some of the things that can go west, which probably means that this one actually won't call the other one either, because what'll happen is it's trying to call itself and it thinks it's engaged, which of course proves that the whole thing is working. It is a live demo, darling, darling. So, everything works off camera. We'll worry about that one later on, I think, but I think, hopefully, you get the idea. And we'll just turn these off so that we've got battery for the live demo outside. If you can turn off the phone that you've got over there for me as well, that would be super. And, okay, they're going, turning off. Excellent. So, things that we're looking to do in the future. One of the key things, and this is partly implemented and still some work to go, SIP is a nasty, chatty protocol. It relies on you having a beautifully bountiful internet connection. And the whole way that SIP and VoIP and everything is done today is not well suited to having satellite links with terrible latency, Wi-Fi links and mesh links that have terrible packet loss parameters. So, we're making this thing that we call AirClutch, which combines our distributed numbering architecture gateway that does all this number routing so that it can be terminated on either side of a satellite link. So, there is no traffic flowing over that link except when somebody makes a call. But, you know, a bit like an Ethernet bridge, it will kind of exchange information about what phones are on each side of the bridge. So, you can have these gateways between meshes and you can also have them connecting back to the outside world. And they'll kind of know to the outside world that you can actually attempt to call any number over that link. So, you know, maybe 100 bytes. One of the really fascinating things with this, SMS per byte is absurdly overpriced. It's cheaper to send data to the Hubble Space Telescope and back. Using a satellite at $10 per megabyte, we can actually do SMS cheaper than what your carrier is probably charging you today. Anywhere in the world, there's hopefully a little bit of room for some competitive pressure in this process. So, what's next? We're going to do the demo outside at lunchtime. We're great to have as many of you come as you'd like. We have a whole really interesting technology road map that, again, we're quite happy to talk with people about but is more than this talk can really contain. We're applying for grants. We're looking for commercial funding. There's some really interesting commercial opportunities in this that actually do not in any way undermine making a completely free open GPL mesh mobile telephony system. And indeed, what's your code is actually already available under GPL. But there's still some very interesting commercial opportunities that if anyone would like to be an angel investor for us or be involved in, we'd love to do it. I should qualify that. Only if you're a, what do you call it? A sophisticated investor, yes. I'm not soliciting funds from the general public. Because how can we? Correct, that is very illegal. So if any of you have a large company that likes investing, maybe you're a venture capital, excellent. But fundamentally, give me 20 good people and we will change the world. You've seen today, this works. People have said Wi-Fi is useless for actual realistic meshing. It's useless for doing telephony. It's useful for a whole pile, useless in the real world for all of these things because it has a whole pile of bad properties. Sure, it's not ideal. And we'll get off Wi-Fi under something else as soon as we can and we have a whole pile of interesting ideas around that. But you know what? It even works today. We've shown it and we're gonna show it again out there and we've shown it in the Australian Outback. We're excited that this technology is not gonna cost anyone a cent. There's no reason why it can't be put in every phone that's physically capable of supporting it and that it can save lives, that it can save stress and duress in disasters, that it can connect the last two billion and actually connect the last five billion to the internet because it's all over IP, remember? And effectively, it gives us the opportunity for a change to bridge the digital divide. It gives us a chance to make a difference in this world. And I've never had a job that's been so satisfying and frankly, actually so fun. The university has more or less agreed to buy me a small blimp. These are the kinds of things that don't happen in your ordinary work. But we can make a difference and we can impact billions of lives and open source, as we know, has already touched so many lives and this is another fantastic opportunity for open source to make the world a better place. Thank you very much. We've got a very short time for a few questions so I'll try and get the mic to you. While the mic's roving up there, this is our dream. Every last cheap, nasty mobile phone will come with our software on it and that people will look at the box and go, yes, this is a phone that can work in a disaster. This can do free calls. You can read the fine print for the conditions at the bottom if you like. So I was looking at the abstract for this talk in December and I tried really, really, really hard to find either a sort of project, like a developer-oriented project page or a source code repository and I wasn't able to find either. Are they up somewhere now or where are they? The source code has actually been up since October or November. I couldn't find it. We haven't got it organised in a really nice way. If you would like to be a person that would like to help us set that up in the developer community around it, these are things that are very high on our priority that we need to do. I've just been flat out like a lizard drinking, trying to get everything happening. Is this something that runs on Android 1.6, 1.5? Yeah, to run on 1.6, that's what we're targeting. Okay, so it doesn't run on the newer versions and is this a modification to the Android system or is this just an external thing that you control? At the moment, with the development version, you need a rooted Android phone running Cyanogen Mod 5 or newer and then our code runs on it. But we have cunning plans to move away from needing a rooted phone and to support essentially any Android distribution and not just Android, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Nokia platforms, the whole kitten caboodle. Every phone. Thank you. Basic question, when you've got Mesh going, how many hops can you use for voice before it becomes unusable? At the moment, somewhere around five hops with the mobile phones is about right, but we have plans afoot to refine the protocols and some preemptive retransmission and error correction that we think we can push that out quite substantially. And that's part of the things we want to pursue. So as Jeff Houston said a couple of days ago, IPv4 is effectively full and there isn't any more. IPv6? I was asked this question this morning and our solution is actually that we will use a single IPv4 address for all the phones in the world because we'll be using broadcast UDP and we'll be using the public key subscriber IDs as the actual unique identifier. So all the phones can have the same IP address and just broadcast to each other. So we've been very efficient with bandwidth and with IP addresses. I'll get a, did you use a lot of the military shortwave radio automatic link establishment design as the springboard for this? No, what we've used very much the work by the Village Tilco with the mesh potato just using Wi-Fi and Batman for the mesh routing. It's, because it has to work with off the shelf phone hardware. To get this in every phone, it must require not a single change to the hardware or single addition to the hardware. We need to have the barrier to entry as low as it can possibly be. Because the walkie-talkies with the mesh networks you can get within high frequency road military radios. Yeah, look, you absolutely can, but it adds cost to the handset and where that's possible to do, fantastic. We'll do it, but it has to also work when you don't have that. So in a hypothetical future, if I'm at the MCG with 50,000 other people who have these phones, will we actually be able to call each other rather than just not being enough connections available in the cell and no one can use their phones? Hopefully, I don't see any reason why not. And I'd love to try that out one day. That would be very awesome. Yes. With the PSTN gateway, can maybe I must, can outside call into the mesh? Yes, it can be done both ways. We're not demonstrating that today. What we have ready for demonstration is outbound. Have you actually done simulations of large cells, large number of nodes? Have I done any simulation? No. What we've done is we've made and we've proven it to work. Because this project was actually created while I was essentially full-time employed doing something else. And we had one of the other talks from this conference. You can actually hear some of the story about the entertaining time that was in that process. Unfortunately, now the university's given me a research fellowship for three years and so we can look to doing some of the more theoretical work. Obviously, your project's aimed at disasters, but I'm imagining that the telcos are going to be concerned that you're undermining their cost, their revenue stream. Yes. That may well be the case, but the key thing actually is it's not going to destroy telcos. In actual fact, telcos are the ideal people to provide the interconnect between the local meshes. They may find that the marketplace for them changes a little bit. Certainly for the first telco to partner with us, there is actually some enormous positive dividends to be had and we would encourage any carrier to talk to us about that. Sure. While it's walking a word about power, the mesh already runs for longer on battery than a phone does without cellular coverage hunting for cell towers. That uses four watts of power, essentially continuously transmitting and depletes your battery real fast as we found out at Arcarolla. I'm guessing it's different software between the one and the one that connects into... Okay. When you connect, have a phone that's got a SIM card in it. Yes. The person has an option to choose not to allow... Correct, and there'll be a means for them to recoup the costs of the data they expend. The software will be the same on all of the phones. It's just I've been in a real area on properties and you have black spots, but with phones. The problem is when you're in the back of a property, there is no justification to put a cell tower in for one person. Correct, but this provides a solution for exactly that application and we have property owners already talking to us about that and I might add that she's Country Towns around Australia have approached us as well. Sorry, and I think you can get Paul... The demo, is that right? Certainly. Thank you, Paul. This is a small gift from behalf of the finished product.