Thirty years ago if you wanted a phone connection in Africa or India you had to pay a large amount of money and join a long waiting list for a landline. The mobile revolution went a long way to helping with that. Mobile base stations can be introduced much quicker and relatively low cost mobile devices allowed many more people to join the communications revolution.
However, up till now it still took a lot of money to create a company offering mobile infrastructure. There were two reasons for this – hardware and software. GSM base station hardware is sold by a small number of companies and is extremely expensive. Likewise GSM software, which is very complex, was offered at a price that removed most entrepreneurs from that market.
However, things are in the process of changing. Firstly the introduction of software radio technology, for example GNU Radio, means that much simpler hardware can be purchased that will handle mobile calls. The last part to fall into place is the introduction of an open source GSM stack. The OpenBTS project are working on turning this into reality. Currently their test setup has a range of 10 miles and backhauls through a standard broadband connection. As long as there is a working internet connection local people can very quickly get connected using standard cheap mobile handsets. Read more »
