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GSM and Asterisk Integration?
MistabewM asks: "Would it be possible to place a GSM transceiver within you home that can be tied into Asterisk in a way that would allow you to place calls from your GSM phone across your VOIP connection or though your local landline? An analogous system is being introduced on airplanes that will allow passengers to use their GSM phones in flight. I feel this would be a fantastic hack and could even be scaled up to provide large areas of free GSM service."
Sounds like an interesting hack indeed, but I'm not sure how it will result in a free service. Someone needs to administer the Asterisk server, pay for electricity, the bandwidth to the server and lastly don't you need a license to use GSM frequencies? If you'd be willing to cover all these costs, then sure, it will be free.
And also hopefully, the handsets will use low enough power that it doesn't result in the equivalent of a 35000-foot cell tower.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=17017
He wants it the other way around, and that is not possible. You can't just activate your own GSM micro-cell. It's a licensed band for which you don't have a license.
...could even be scaled up to provide large areas of free GSM service.
How exactly do you get large numbers of GSM transceivers for free? This sounds suspiciously like a dot-bomb business model. I mean, I'm willing to buy a wifi router and give away my internet connection because any tool with a wifi card can figure out how it works and take advantage of it. But buy a GSM transceiver, host an Asterisk server, and manage it all for strangers who walk past my house? What a tech support pain in the ass.
What's your damage, Heather?
This is like attaching a cellphone to your asterisk. It allows you to make calls across the GSM network and to receive calls to the number programmed on the SIM card and pass them to the asterisk box.
There have been some attempts to do what the parent is asking about, but I do not know of any that have been rolled out for public consumption.
Interesting, but thats the opposite of what the post requests. That allows you to use your cellphone minutes from you home phone.
The poster wants to use their landline/sip minutes from their cell phone when at home.
>It's a licensed band for which you don't have a license.
as long as your at a low enough power, and your not interfearing with anyones communication, you are allowed to. same as those ipod/radio transmitters to your car radio.
I would say as long as their is no GSM availabilty where you want to deploy this, and a limited range, it would be legal. I say this because I have helped install a transmitter, for my company, with AT&T's approvel though, for a test.
No, in most juristictions, it's illegal to operate your own base station on any of the frequencies supported by GSM (850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz, I think 450MHz is coming on stream in various places too. But that's also a problem.)
However, there's a new system called UMA that tunnels the GSM protocols through an IP connection provided by either an 802.11 base station or some form of bluetooth receiver. The system has some limitations in its present form, the major ones being:
- Few carriers support it. In the US, practically none do.
- Few phones are available that support it. In theory, most bluetooth supporting phones could be made to support it with a firmware update. But that's not likely to happen. I know the UK version of Motorola's RAZR V3 now supports the feature, but it's in a small class of phones and the US version doesn't yet.
- Each "base station" has to be registered by the GSM operator, I have NO IDEA why. That means plain old open WAPs in malls wouldn't provide a solution to poor coverage inside them, for instance, and you (probably) couldn't use the system to defeat roaming charges by using a Starbucks WiFi connection in the UK with your Cingular phone.
It also isn't exactly what you've asked for. It's largely seen as a system to help phone users improve their reception and reduce their dependence on the capacity of the wide range GSM network. It's designed to be seamless, you can start a call on the 802.11 network, step "out of range", and the call will transfer to a nearby GSM tower just as it would if you were going out of range of any other GSM tower.By comparison, it looks like you're just after a way to turn a GSM phone into a cordless handset.
I've covered the system in my journal. It'd be nice to see it better supported, and to see other standards also adopt it such as the CDMA ones. Much of the issues of capacity and poor reception would be dealt with if the system became a standard part of most people's mobile phones.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Of course, one would need to know the term "picocell" in connection with GSM to search efficiently, otherwise you could be spending some time searching.
GSM might be still one of the most common mobile phone standards but it is the fastest declining one, making way to the fastest growing one ever which is WiFi in the flavors of 802.11b/g and very soon WiMax(802.16). Low-cost WiFi phones are already on the market.