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Homemade VoIP Network Over Wi-Fi Routers
AnInkle writes "A blogger on The Tech Report details his research and testing of wireless voice communication options for remote mountainous villages in rural undeveloped areas. The home-built project involves open-source software, low-cost wireless routers, solar power, mesh networking, unlicensed radio frequencies and VoIP technology. Although his research began several months ago, he has concluded the first stage of testing and is preparing to move near one of the sites where he hopes to eventually install the final functional network. Anyone with experience or ideas on the subject is invited to offer input and advice."
David Rowe has been quite busy working on cool, low-cost telcomm stuff. His site also has links and comments and so forth from others interested in the subject, including people doing actual, in the field, deployments in fairly poor and hostile(to the tech) environments.
I think the main drive according to the article is the 802.11x frequencies tend to be de-regulated and free to use, cell networks have ongoing fees to use that portion of the spectrum. Also wireless routers have very low power requirements and can be run via hippy fuel (aka solar) instead of some poor bugger having to run the mother of all extension cords up a mountain.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
Technology alone is not sufficient. For any project like this to work for more than a couple of years, it must have a sustainable business model. (In the long run, at least as much money needs to come in as is going out.) Village Phone, which builds on traditional cell phone technology, has been very successful in bringing communications to rural Africa. Their model, in summary, involves an entrepreneur from the village purchasing a cell phone, roof antenna, and charger with the help of a microloan. They are then able to sell minutes to villagers for a profit. The cell phone antenna must be within about 35 km of a cell phone tower and have line of sight, thus making the technological aspect of this model unworkable in many rural or mountainous regions.The business model, however, could potentially be used just as successfully with other technologies, including WiFi paired with VoIP.
hilarious
Hold your horses, Osama, it's not perfect yet :)
hilarious
Zero chance. I'd even deem it unlikely that the original project survives for long. Telcos are missing out revenue when you communicate for free, the feds owe them one for the wiretapping thing, so I expect a law soon against this. Because of ... because of ... national security or whatever fits.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I experimented with 5 units of WRT54G wireless routers running Freifunk firmware and I tried saturating the link with several G.729 VoIP calls. The system doesn't scale well. Over 3 hops, the number of calls greatly reduces as there is just too much random delay. In order for voice communication to be worthwhile, the latency cannot be more than 200ms although there are good forward error correction schemes and huge buffers.
Latency is a real problem especially when you are doing it over several hops. The "lag" isn't consistent. It will hit you at random interval, and that can be extremely irritating. This may be due to the use of CSMA/CA and RTS/CTS (depending on configuration). I haven't found a way to improve it though...
w00t