Ignored by big companies, Mexican village creates its own mobile service | Hacker News Reader

Ignored by big companies, Mexican village creates its own mobile service

articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com

192 pointsSuraj-Sun32 comments

Slightly off topic.

In germany there's a movement called Freifunk. The ambition is to build a community driven open Wifi-Mesh-Network by flashing low-cost routers with the Freifunk firmware. So these routers can auto discover their neighbours and then connects via the routing protocol called batman-adv to a mesh. If there's no neighbour router, batman-adv gets tunneled over the internet to connect to the Freifunk network. It's an IPv6 network with gateways to the IPv4 internet.

The problem in Germany is, that on the country-side, there are a lot of dark holes by providing broadband internet. Some villages has to connect with 64kbit/s. We have the year 2013.. What the people in these villages do is, they hire one big fibre and share it over the community driven Freifunk mesh network to gain broadband access to all the people in the village.

the same thing happens in the US:

http://muninetworks.org/tags/tags/rural-electric-coop

In Brazil, it is illegal to share Internet connection with neighbours, the fine is about US$ 4000. Article from Brazilian newspaper "Share internet with neighbors can generate fine of up to R$ 8000": http://bit.do/illegal-to-share-internet-connection

"According to the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel), wireless networks can not exceed the perimeter of the residence of the subscriber and the signal can not be sold, regardless of whether or not to generate profit."

That sounds like a home connection. Is the same thing going to apply if you get a dedicated business line?

My father was threatened by Telecom here in New Zealand for this. They wouldn't provide broadband to him due to him being too far from the exchange and he made a passing comment about using his neighbours. They were rather nasty. He lives rurally and his neighbour's house comes off a street that is considerably closer to the exchange. It's a rather odd mentality to refuse to provide something and refuse to allow a workaround that will still generate some revenue.

I think he's the same guy who tried to raise money on IndieGoGo for it. He didn't achieve the goal, but he did it anyway:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/community-cell-phone/

Seems so, the hardware is the same, according to another news article about the subject.

He did get the money raised, however, as it was using the Flexible Funding model:

"This campaign has ended and will receive all funds raised. Funding duration: February 10, 2013 - March 24, 2013 (11:59pm PT)."

Well, thats a much better source than the original indiatimes.

So it is an actual GSM network, and it runs OpenBTS. Awesome.

It seems OpenBTS only works for 2G. Hopefully Bellard will open source his LTE base station software in a few years, to accelerate the rise of such networks all over the world:

http://bellard.org/lte/

Add http://openvolte.org/ and you have a voice network as well.

That is way cool. The idea that the baseband processor should handle voice audio paths and mobile network signaling is a very "bellhead" idea. With all-IP networks, doing voice payload and signaling in the user space of the main CPU is fine, and could result in more telephony apps based on being able to access voice and signalling more readily. Like, for example, secure calls.

My understanding is they do support 3G but don't use the GSM standards for 3G networking to do it, they run IP directly over the air interface with a more direct protocol.

Note: America Movil, Carlos Slim's mobile network, controls 80% of the Mexican market. In that context, this is just a really awesome story of empowerment.

Maybe it's 1/13th the cost of the network in Mexico City because it provides less than 1/13th the usage.

>There is one catch: phone calls must be limited to a maximum of five minutes to avoid a saturation of lines.

Marykirk (Aberdeenshire, Scotland) is doing the same thing after giving up on BT, etc.

Interesting. Link?

My parents live in a tiny village in South West England where there is no mobile or terrestrial TV.

Certainly. You can find more at http://www.marykirk.com/

I became aware of the project because it's being driven (at least in part) by a former colleague in the IBM (Lotus) Notes and Domino development community, "Wild" Bill Buchan. You can find him at http://www.billbuchan.com/

This is fixed wireless internet access, rather than a local GSM network. It's very unlikely that Ofcom would licence a small local mobile network.

That's the starting point, and one has to start somewhere. (I think the main hope is to shame someone into providing service, but they'll build what they can't get.)

The web page of the project: http://rhizomatica.org/

I have family in a similar village, these are exciting news, because we have been ignored by operators during years.

The article seems a bit confused. They are in Mexico, but got licensed by the FCC?!

Fair enough to assume this will only be a local network? You need to be a registered Operator in order to have roaming agreements for connectivity to other networks.

Additionally if they are using SIM cards issued by another operator that attaches to this network it will have to remain local as the global title routing would route back to the home network's HLR that the subscriber belongs to during the location update procedure.

From the article: "The equipment used in Talea, which was provided by California-based Range Networks, includes a 900mhz radio network and computer software that routes calls, registers numbers and handles billing. Calls to the United States are channeled via a voice over Internet protocol ( VoIP) provider."

I'd guess they have VoIP trunking to some upstream voice provider from their BTS. The carrier they have an agreement with might provide roaming outside their OpenBTS world, so using their SIMs could be part of such an arrangement.

This is an exciting model. I believe network connectivity should be treated like a local utility that is priced based on cost, not as a premium service

They drive up their cost of doing business exponentially by making bad business decisions.

I'd rather have the lowest price. Cost-based pricing doesn't necessarily achieve that on the medium to long term, because it leaves no margin for cost-cutting innovation.

In any case, the problem here wasn't the price, but the cost itself; even if they were doing it at-cost, no telco would just send a guy with an antenna, a 2W amplifier and a computer, that can only support a few dozen calls simultaneously. They just work at a much bigger scale.

Where's Carlos Slim when you need him?

The article says it's Carlos Slim's company that was ignoring the village because the population was too small:

"After being ignored by a company owned by the world's richest man Carlos Slim, a tiny Mexican village has developed its own mobile network with international connections."

"The village of Villa Talea de Castro, dotted with small pink and yellow homes, has a population of 2,500 indigenous people. Tucked away in a lush forest in the southern state of Oaxaca, it was not seen as a profitable market for companies such as Slim's America Movil. The company wanted at least 10,000 subscribers to bring the village into its mobile coverage, AFP said."

And now we know why Slim is one of the richest men in the world.

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