Introducing OpenCellular: An open source wireless access platform
code.facebook.com
code.facebook.com
The modules will need to pass EMC Compliance testing and be issued Compliance Certificates (expensive!).
A suitable Cell frequency plan will need to be created, approved by the local government, and then (expensive!) Radio Licenses issued.
Licensing as a Carrier and approval to connect with the local Telcom provider will need to be arranged, along with the (expensive!) registration fees.
Then when you have it running you'll suddenly run into interference problems from all the unlicensed boxes already installed by well meaning NGO's and private organisations. Not to mention clashes with networks in neighboring countries.
Bottom line: It's not as simple as just mounting radio box on a post and switching it on.
Open Source phone towers are not a new concept. Has been already done in a number of third world and island states. But without government licensing and approval to back you up, a bunch of soldiers will arrive and simply rip out your gear.
The above questions/comments are based on actual field experience in third world countries...
Also maybe it could work in a city, where neighborhoods join together to request a license from the city and the city will work with neighborhoods choosing suitable locations as to not interfere too much with each other.
But of course it requires a political campaign and this might be a trigger to start that, with facebook also helping.
The temptation is to let companies use new frequencies wherever they want, but in the longer term this results in chaos, and the only solution is to rip it all up and start again (at huge cost and disruption to service).
The only workable approach is to design an interlocking network of spacial and frequency allocations and then stick with it, and make sure that each block is fully utilised before moving on to a new block.
With all of the above considerations, the cost of the actual network hardware is negligible, especially if the consequence is that poor villages will have to abandon their total investment in equipment at some arbitrary point in the future.
And it would be probably much easier to try such technologies on an Indian village(low spectral use, low buildings offering little interference, relatively cheaper labor).
[1]https://www.seas.gwu.edu/~cheng/Publications/2012/DSA-WC-201...
This is the single most important obstacle here. Moreover, the bureaucratic procedures one has to jump through, to get such a thing approved, are extremely opaque.
In a country like India, where the government talks about stuff like "power to the people" all the time, when someone tries to implement such a network on the ground because it's really needed and helps fulfill the ruling party's election promises, they would be stopped by local authorities who would cite some vague law or seek some hefty bribe.
Either way, I appreciate that a company like facebook would spend so much time and money to do a nice thing like this.
Of course, content providers and infrastructure providers do not buy licenses altruistically.
I think we're seeing Facebook being willing to invest in tech and potentially license fees because the ROI of having Facebook in a village can be estimated and offering this hardware looks like a worthwhile investment.
While this sounds like a cynical perspective, it is not. Suppose a typical company would analyze the ROI and conclude that if the payout doesn't happen in 2 years it is not worth it.
Facebook may be considering a 10 year ROI and thus may be acting both selfishly and also taking on infrastructure risk that has suffered from market failure until 2016 since no providers of first world infrastructure have opted to invest.
In a capitalist utopia, anything with positive ROI would receive investment, and all risks could be accurately hedged, allowing all available capital to be fully utilized.
There may be some circumstances where it can help, but it does not eliminate scarcity.
It doesn't.
Ultra-Wideband doesn't create new bandwidth. It just re-uses the existing spectrum in a different way.
And by raising the general background noise it steals bandwidth from all the other users, so everybody is worse off.
Or to put it another way "There ain't no such thing as a free lunch".
https://www.shoretel.com/history-federal-communications-comm...
With spectrum, there's also a real-time use component. People who consume platinum generally don't consume it in a way that in any way resembles communication use. This is related to another key reason governments hold on to the control of spectrum allocation: military interests.
Also, there would need to be regulations on signal quality, since a bad citizen in a shared-spectrum scheme adversely impacts others.
Yes. Including arbitrary licenses enforced by local governments to raise the barrier to entry and restrict interconnected innovation through forcing all players to route through a central (likely selfish) entity. This does not benefit the public.
Not sure how a corrupt government is part of your definition of a capitalist utopia.
In my definition of a capitalist utopia, there exists the optimal amount of regulation to maximize long term welfare. This means no regulations that benefit the next 3 years at the expense of the future, and also none that benefit the next 20 at the expense of the longer-term future. Regulations that do exist are consistently enforced without corruption or bureaucratic waste.
In our actual (non-utopian) system, most regulations have the side-effect of benefitting one constituency or interest group over another, or one relevant time-horizon over another (most are profoundly short-sighted).
Also, in a capitalist utopia there would be administrative districts that would allow for various regulatory schemes to be tested and compared scientifically, so even if one local government did make the mistake of offering a state-sponsored monopoly, the mistake would quickly be realized and corrected.
Well, yes. One of the functions of government is to adjudicate incompatible desires.
This doesn't mean it always should, but something is going to play that role, and if it isn't a government, it is something that will be called a government once the shooting stops.
"Servants, labourers and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconvenience to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed and lodged." - Adam Smith
However in a utopian version, perhaps there would be some mechanism by which the longer-term interests of children could be represented democratically.
I would also argue that in a capitalist utopia there would not be things that we typically call market failures, since institutions would emerge to solve the problems based on market incentives.
Also, I'm not arguing that a capitalist utopia could exist, just that it is sometimes useful to offer contrast to the idea that big firms must somehow have an enlightened and altruistic vision in order to make investments like the one in the article. It could in fact just be the true north of the profit motive animating longer-term planning than we typically see (due to perverse incentives that focus most businesses on very short-term planning).
At the end of the day, it's a response to the tragedy of the commons problem, designed on the theory of making the commons a lot less common (exclusively licensing sections of spectrum to approved users).
Most third world countries have enthusiastically adoped mobile phones and have leap-frogged the creation of landline networks.
The result of this is two-fold: The Radio Spectrum is heavily used, and also very inefficiently used as so much traffic which should be carried by landlines is forced onto mobile networks.
If you've traveled in remote areas of Thailand, Cambodia or even Laos, you'll be aware of the incredible penetration of mobile phones and even the Internet.
Has there been any research into OpenBTS, Osmocom, OpenLTE ?
This is really an opportunity for Facebook to show that they are serious with their efforts to bring Internet to developing regions.
Especially with the delayed adoption of Cellular tech generations on the cellphone side, I think an open source Stack is the only way to go.
If the networks are built using decommissioned tech from somewhere else, it will be brittle and won't be cost effective in the long run, especially considering energy consumption.
The only missing part now is a baseband implementation with GSM/UMTS/(LTE) support.
Facebook is not interested in bringing Internet to developing regions.
Facebook is interested in bringing facebook to developing regions.
For Facebook, using open source to increase internet density is really just a PR stunt, as they won't own anything with the customer.
That said, their WhatsApp investment is more relevant in the third world.
The argument seems to be that the cost of phone base stations is holding back development in 3rd world countries, but no evidence for this is offered.
Firstly, the world-wide mobile phone market is huge and fiercely competitive. You can now buy a 2G Chinese base station surprisingly cheaply.
Secondly, there are thousands of tons of secondhand gear lying idle. An example: Australia is about to rip out all of its 2G network. This will mean umpteen thousands of GSM/GPRS base stations being dumped for scrap.
Thirdly, the cost of the radio gear is a small part of the total cost of a base station. The cost of the Shed, Power Supply, Solar Panels and Batteries, Mast and footings, Coax, Diplexers, Antennas, etc, will be far more. Just the expense of running power to the top of the hill will likely exceed that of the electronics.
But the big cost will be extending a dozen or so outside lines to the national telephone network. Just setting up the billing arrangements, etc, will be a huge job.
The bit that really worries me would be staffing. I can imaging a bunch of enthusiastic western hobbyists turning up to install the gear, then departing leaving no-one to maintain it. I'm betting that after a week or three the whole system will be down.
But lastly is the assumption that the locals can't do all this. In any remote community there will be skilled local entrepreneurs who are selling and repairing electronic equipment. It is these people who need to be the ones who install a phone system. If they haven't yet, it will not be because of lack of cheap gear, but because of the non-existence of basic infrastructure, eg a national phone network to connect to.
And you can be sure that if there is no local phone tower, there will already be a VHF mobile radio network used by police and businessmen (eg the "red radio" VHF CBs in remote Thailand).
To quote:
"In many cellular network deployments, the cost of the civil and supporting infrastructure (land, tower, security, power, and backhaul) is often much greater than the cost of the cellular access point itself."
Indeed, this is not an order of magnitude question - several orders of magnitude.
"One of our goals was to make architectural and design improvements that would result in lower costs associated with the civil and supporting infrastructure."
Hmm, really? Facebook don't think that the established players in the market are not aggressively pursuing the same design improvements?
Will this spur them on? Marginally, yes.
This is not a hard market to get into, with commodity off the shelf chips for cells being available (e.g. from Intel via MindSpeed via PicoChip).
It's good to see Facebook investing in fundamental R&D. I just can't shake the feeling they are struggling to find areas to make strategic plays if this is the best that they can do.
I'd say not quite: Since most of the first world dollars go into cutting edge technology, there is low-hanging fruit in the now-miniaturized, super-inexpensive chips that make it orders of magnitude cheaper/simpler to create reliable 2G infrastructure. So much cheaper that using second hand gear is not a better option at scale.
> You can now buy a 2G Chinese base station surprisingly cheaply.
I imagine FB engineered its own version of similar technology, but with a product focus that is aligned with the company's goals.
> Just the expense of running power to the top of the hill
It seems to be designed to be mounted on a building, so I'm guessing it's not intended to replace a massive tower installation, but instead to offer a very cheap and useful, easy-to-install access point that happens to do 2G in addition to (or instead of) wifi.
> Just setting up the billing arrangements, etc, will be a huge job.
Since the users are the product, I think it will likely be free to the end user, at least at first.
> but because of the non-existence of basic infrastructure, eg a national phone network to connect to.
I think FB has plans to offer bandwidth, both as a carrot to convince local regulators to license it, and also to incentivize various service providers to help with the rollout.
Of course, this could this could be a feint: http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/feint.pdf
I think of this (and other open source hardware and software projects) similar to how I think of mathematic theorems or tools at Home Depot. These are good building blocks to learn, prototype and build. If you want to take it commercial, then you have to bear licensing costs etc. but it is a great way for hobbyists to build things on top of these blocks rather than start from scratch.
I don't like the eventual promise of opensourceness. Just make it FOSS out the gate.
By announcing a solution before it's released you can attract the attention of SMEs who might evaluate the solution and provide valuable insights and offer you the opportunity to resolve concerns before users start adopting your solution.
Ideals are great to have but you can't dismiss something of merit simply because it's less than ideal. Ideally all medicine would be free and open source but the fact that they're not doesn't mean we should be turning our backs on them.
Amazing. Just Amazing work from Facebook.
BRCK == A rugged WiFi hotspot that uses cellular data as a back haul to provide WiFi connectivity up to 20 devices
Facebook TIP == A base station that provides LTE connectivity to handsets.
So with Facebook device, you'll be able to set up your own LTE network and be a mobile operator whereas BRCK has no such capability.
Seems to be right in line with the open compute project.
Facebook is to OpenCellular what Google is to Android: they do not really care for the disconnected, they just want a bigger market and are willing to invest in infra rather than waiting for telcos to do it.
How do these boxes connect to the rest of the Internet or public phone network?