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Burning Man Goes Open Source For Cell Phones
coondoggie passes along this excerpt from Network World:
"Today I bring you a story that has it all: a solar-powered, low-cost, open source cellular network that's revolutionizing coverage in underprivileged and off-grid spots. It uses VoIP yet works with existing cell phones. It has pedigreed founders. Best of all, it is part of the sex, drugs and art collectively known as Burning Man. ... The technology starts with the 'they-said-it-couldn't-be-done' open source software, OpenBTS. OpenBTS is built on Linux and distributed via the AGPLv3 license. When used with a software-defined radio such as the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP), it presents a GSM air interface ("Um") to any standard GSM cell phone, with no modification whatsoever required of the phone. It uses open source Asterisk VoIP software as the PBX to connect calls, though it can be used with other soft switches, too. ... This is the third year its founders have decided to trial-by-fire the system by offering free cell phone service to the 50,000-ish attendees at Burning Man, which begins today in Black Rock City, Nevada. "
Seriously, I'm totally confused by this. Did the burning man attendees actually set the /article/ on fire as well?
I never figured the Burning Man crowd as open source developers. Yeah pretty much just the sex drugs and art crowd. Gotta stay off the drugs man.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
I haven't been to Burning Man in a few years, but when I did go it was nice to get away from it all. I suppose I could choose to not use/bring my cell phone - but if other people are still tethered to the ordinary world...? Well - bummer!
What about encryption? How do I know my call is safe, and do I trust the operator of these devices?
In a crowd of 50,000 people I'm not sure that call safety and call security are the most reasonable things to be concerned about...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Sex? Drugs? I saw NOTHING, NOTHING I say *shrugging shoulders*
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
While cell phones are nifty and I wouldn't want to live day to day without mine, I think this is largely missing the point of Burning Man.
Jherico
What can the average user can do to ensure his security? "Nothing, you're screwed"
Looks like you have to spend thousands to build a working solution. If you were hoping to use GSM phones as cordless phones any time soon, you'd better have buckets of ducats.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're in the middle of the desert. It's not like there are 50K people crammed into a tiny area.
Is this the same Burning Man that claims copyright on any PRIVATE photos taken at their events?
PASS. Horrible IP grab + single Open Source project is still a negative, methinks.
You think that's bad? Right now you are surrounded by almost 7 billion people!
But... the future refused to change.
Cool project. Unfortunately the use of AGPL will guarantee no one ever uses it. Too bad. Imagine having a base station where you have to require a partition for the source. Or people with broken cell phones saying you're not providing an equal opportunity to download the software source. Ugh.
TFA says they get a license for the bands they are using up there. Of course, they could be lying through their teeth. In either case, the FCC really doesn't do that much unless you are causing QRM to folks who do have licenses.
They're in the middle of the desert. It's not like there are 50K people crammed into a tiny area.
Sure, there is a fair bit of space available, but for the popular acts (especially performing arts) the crowd density can get rather high. After all, Burning Man isn't just MOMA spread out randomly across the desert.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
FYI,
Some have inquired as to using OpenBTS with FreeSWITCH as well as Asterisk. Alberto Escudero (aka AEP) wrote this wiki page nearly a year ago:
http://wiki.freeswitch.org/wiki/OpenBTS
It's slightly dated but the information is accurate.
-MC
The FCC grants them a temporary experimental license because they can't cause much interference out in the middle of the desert. If you fire up OpenBTS anywhere in civilization you're probably breaking the law. Fortunately the equipment is a bit more expensive than CB radio and the carriers have a real incentive to crack down on interferers, so I doubt there will be too many problems in the real world.
I think what he's trying to say is that he was Steve Jobs best customer.
Their FAQ, http://pagalegba2010.wikispaces.com/FAQ, has a link to the experimental FCC license: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/FieldTest3/STAGrant.pdf
Also, re: "crew of climbing riggers, a 150ft $750K telescopic crane with operator, 3 skilled RF engineers to wire it up, 2 people with a degree in CS to set up the software and 5+ days to spare to set it up and debug it"... They sent one of these to Haiti and it was set up and running in about an hour in a hospital which used it for two weeks until their regular phones were fixed after the earthquake.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
I fear the burning man festival may soon flame out, or at best, morph into an anemic lame-o semblance of it's former self
I think I've been hearing that it's already done that from people who have attended it every year in the last decade. People were probably saying the same thing before then, I just wasn't paying attention.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ummm, I'm confused. The frequencies that GSM uses are licensed by the FCC to specific operators. The phones are used under the control of the operator, who has a license for each and every cell site.
It's the confusion born from not RTFAing.
GSM operates on licensed bandwidth, so for any U.S. installation, the OpenBTS crew always obtains a FCC license and works with the local carrier to coordinate frequency use. When attendees get into range and power up their phones, the system sends them a text that says "Reply to this message with your phone number and you can send and receive text messages and make voice calls."
I'm guessing the person who modded you up didn't RTFA either.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
On the Current TV documentary last night, the organizers themselves said it had gone from being a counter-culture event to a mainstream cultural event. I still like the idea of a gift economy, but think I think most music festivals operate at least partially on that principle. For any gathering to survive, as the number of attendees goes way up you need to implement some fascist rules just to maintain public safety, e.g. "Don't climb the 100-foot tall artwork" and "Don't stand so close to the Burning Man that it lands on you when it collapses".
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How much of that $10,000 is the cost of the Solar Power? Photovoltaics, inverters, and batteries ain't cheap. As far as the crane, they've got plenty of those on site for the build anyway, so it's a shared expense. The labor is presumably all volunteer.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Burning Man had its brief, shining moment, but when was that...? Circa mid-90's? Now it's a staged pseudo-event the very promotion of which cuts against the grain of what it was supposed to be. I see the jowly middle-aged Marketing Suits queuing up for their Burning Man tickets and I am reminded of the giddy tourists in and around Woodstock, NY paying $25 for a tie-dyed peace-sign T-shirt.
Have you ever been? It is the population density of a city, modulo the multistory units (except for the nuts who do build those). I don't know what the plan this year is (I'm missing it this year, sniff), but last year, the camp radius was 2100 feet, putting the vast bulk of those 50K people in a 1-mile diameter area. Not many people camp in "deep playa" (the burner term for the area outside of the radial roads but inside the trash perimeter).
Back on topic, there's been signal there for at least the last three years, but it became useless once the gates opened and the hordes descended. My take is that cell service during the main event is going to be a net negative, but it is inevitable. It will become something akin to the ongoing war on glow sticks - a bunch of us will mercilessly mock glow-stuck cellphone users and try to shame them into putting the fucking things down and be present, and it mostly won't work.
Those of us who do LNT (Leave No Trace, the massive cleanup effort post event) will get to ground score cellphones, though. People lose everything else.
I forget what 8 was for.
Where do naked people carry their phones?
This is /..
When I see "open source" I assume that there can be no "licensing fee". My bad.
It's not as if most carriers have a reputation for really caring about customer privacy...
Tweet, tweet.
I think what he's trying to say is that he was Steve Jobs best customer.
Score...literally. OMG so funny wish I hadn't spent my mod points as rhook clearly needs to be modded up. As for Steve's excessive LSD use he obviously didn't listen to me when I told him not to eat the brown acid. Sadly some things can never be undone.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Amen.
It would be interesting to use the network to coordinate light and fire displays across the playa.
Does this mean that RMS can finally use a cellphone?
-- Cheers!
how do you relay sms messages to/from the handset? do you have to setup a gateway with an existing SMS provider?
Do you seriously not understand the difference between a software license and a license to use radio spectrum? Buying a completely GPL'd car (hardware and software open sourced/specced) would not mean that you don't need a "driver's license" to drive on public roads since there can't be "Licensing fee" for GPL software...
If you're worried about call security you shouldn't trust the regular cell network, let alone some ad-hoc network setup for a hippie crowd. Regardless of the carrier you should provide your own end-to-end encryption if security is a concern.
There is no mention of FCC's licensing....I thought you need a license to operate a transmitter over 0.1 watt, or something really low like that. I am sure the FCC goons will put their knees on the neck of this project soon to protect their corporate buddies in the cell phone industry.
I am interested in how the people around OpenBTS got licences for 26c3 in Berlin and Fosdem 2010 in Brussels (the licence for Brussels came too late, they could not actually _use_ it. They will in 2011, though).
It's possible to get licences in the middle of civilization.
The gift economy in Black Rock City is amazing. You just walk around and people give you stuff, food, drinks, strange art, random blinky lights, compliments even. Besides the standard cup and water supply I also carried a bottle of vodka, a bag of nuts, sunblock/moisturizing lotion, and sanitary wipes - they were all personally useful and made great gifts. You hunker down in some random camp to wait out a dust storm and whip out your nuts and vodka and say hello, next thing you know someone else has mixers and another person is cooking you lunch. That's the incredible thing about the gift economy, it brings people together in this unique way. Without the expectation of economic exchange the entire culture of the city is transformed at a fundamental level that you really can't grok until you've existed within it for a few days. One of the most amazing behaviors that emerges from this fundamental change is that people become much more willing to help each other. There's this group dynamic that develops where random strangers will suddenly team up to accomplish things for each other. You might overhear two strangers talking about how much they want bacon and remember a bacon themed camp on the other side of the city, you mention it to them and another stranger says they just came from there and the camp is only making bacon for 30 more minutes, there's no way you can get across the city in time, except another stranger who overhears says their neighbor has an artcar who can give everyone a lift. Next thing you know you're riding a pirate ship across the playa with 10 new friends en route to bacon.
The public safety rules are fairly minimal and entirely rational. Last year there was an art installation which was very obviously a potential safety hazard, that was actually the entire purpose of it as the theme of that year was evolution. Many people dumb enough to take the risk suffered minor injury, many others laughed at the idiots. The rate and severity of the injuries were insufficient to force people to not take the risk, if you were stupid enough to do it you were free enough to do it. That's generally how Burning Man is, people will probably warn you when you are putting yourself in danger, and they will help extricate you from danger if necessary, but they will respect your right to express yourself however you see fit.
All you need is a $700 USRP radio with the $275 RFX900 transceiver daughterboard and your are in business.
The software is quite simple to get operating with several step by step how-to guides around the net. As for all that effort in setting up a tower, ham's do it in an afternoon all the time and don't spend all the cash you speak of. As for the license, experimental licenses are cheep and easy to obtain. One could run license free in the 900mhz ISM band (USA) that overlaps 900mhz GSM used elsewhere in the world and keep the power down or crank it up to 1500 watts and call it amateur radio on the same 900mhz band with a easy to obtain license.
Ummm, I'm confused. The frequencies that GSM uses are licensed by the FCC to specific operators. The phones are used under the control of the operator, who has a license for each and every cell site.
This group, (The OpenBTS project) has permission from the carrier with the license for the area (who doesn't happen to have a cell covering the site) to use the band there.
Additionally (as others have pointed out), they have a specific short-term ("experimental") license to perform this test during the period including the festival and the runup to it. This license includes the right to stimulate the cellphones into operation.
The group also provides emergency service to disasters that have taken out the cellular infrastructure, until the carriers can get it back up, and makes low-cost base station equipment designs (using off-the-shelf hardware) available to third-world countries. ($10k and dropping.) The burning-man event gives them an annual opportunity to do an acid test on their latest software and hardware.
Just what you'd expect: The FCC hunts 'em down and shuts 'em down if they're strong enough to be noticed and especially if they interfere with the license holding service provider for that area and band.
Unlike WiFi, but like broadcast radio, the DSM protocols don't support sharing a given band in a given area. The license holders carefully design their cell site arrangements so their own cells don't step on each other (and nearby neighbors near the edge of their area). If you set up an unlicensed homebrew minicell on band that's in use and don't do it inside a shielded box, you'll trash the licensed service and be in deep kimchi, just as if you wiped out a broadcast station with your pirate radio.
Which is why the OpenBTS project was careful to get permission from the licensed carrier and a license from the FCC to run the Burning Man cell site.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It often strikes me as an interesting thing that we have no social mechanism for turning down a technical capability, even when we largely believe it's a bad idea. If a gadget exists, we have to have it, like it or not...
This is me writing on the subject of cellphones at burning man, back in 2005: MORE_OR_LESS
It often strikes me as an interesting thing that we have no social mechanism for turning down a technical capability, even when we largely believe it's a bad idea.
Sure we have mechanisms for turning down a technical capability.
It's called "personal choice".
\
Freedom means each person gets to make that choice for his/her SELF.
"Social Mechanism?" You mean "way for a group to impose its choices on those who disagree with them", don't you?
The closest you have in a free society is persuasion. And others get to argue the other way, or just ignore you. When persuasion becomes social pressure to conform, freedom is replaced by groupthink.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way