Daylight Pony

When first tasked with planning on a cellular network for this essay I first thought about what I would be building it for. I have no prior knowledge or experience in this technology other than the use of my own devices so off to the internet I went. I found an excellent guide to a format called OpenBTS that is specifically geared towards making your own network (Naone 2010). This would enable someone to create an inexpensive cellular base station for remote areas, or places with low infrastructure. Oil rigs, festivals, and mountaintops oh my. Apparently this technology is already in use at the Burning Man festival and the remote island of Niue in the South Pacific (Naone 2010). For my purposes cell phone coverage is kind of weak in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, so maybe I will build my own network on the roof next to my neighbor’s apiary. Hopefully the radio waves won’t make the bees angry.

Now following Naone’s notes for the island Niue I should be able to come up with a basic list of necessary equipment. My previous Dell PC is capable of running a Debian flavored unix distro (OpenBTS 2014) and a copy of Asterisk. Asterisk is an open source program designed to replace the normal GSM infrastructure with VoIP software (Naone (2014). Now phones connected to this network can contact each other, but to get to users outside the network an IP connection to a Telecom is required. The island of Niue uses a 5 Ghz IP radio to connect to the hardwired network of the island (Naone (2014). Now I am sure my local internet provider will breathe brimstone out of their ears when I use my cable connection for the VoIP portion of this OpenBTS setup. This would be much better suited to a place like West Papua, Indonesia where they have also succeeded with this type of project on top of a tree (Gallagher 2014), but this is for science. The power supply on the system is low enough wattage that I might be able to get away with solar with a couple of car batteries as backup. An essential piece I forgot is the USRP and antennae. This will be my most prohibitive expense as these pieces together will cost a bit under $2K. The USRP is a universal software radio peripheral. This device and the antennae are what connect the GSM handsets with this whole system (Naone 2014).

I suppose I would need to determine who would have access to this network. I highly doubt I am going to be able to determine an actual coverage area until I determine the exact USRP and install the antennae. I would likely limit to any friendly neighbors of mine that meet a certain criteria:

1.      Moderate social skills

2.      Have an old phone we can convert to the cause or willingness to purchase their own handset

3.      No Neo-Luddites

Lastly, I would need to figure out how to keep all this secure. David Burgess, of the authors of this OpenBTS genius has left Range Networks that owns the name, but is continuing on with a new version called YateBTS. This will add roaming support from the Yate messaging engine (Burgess 2014). The security features support the MILENAGE and COMP-128V1 authentication algorithms for 2G and 3G authentications and the Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) protocol for mobile account management (Legba 2014).

  References

  Back, A. (2012). Building a GSM network with open source. The H Open. Retrieved from http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Building-a-GSM-network-with-open-source-1476745.html

Burgess, D. (2014). Salut, YateBTS! David Burgess' Own Blog. Retrieved from http://da-bur.blogspot.com/

Gallagher, S. (2014). Cellular’s open source future is latched to tallest tree in the village. Ars Technica Technology Lab / Information Technology. Retrieved from http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/02/cellulars-open-source-future-is-latched-to-tallest-tree-in-the-village/

Legba, Inc. (2014). YateBTS 2.0 delivers new features for open source cellular. Retrieved from

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/yatebts-2-0-delivers-features-070100625.html

Naone, E. (2010). Build Your Own Cellular Network. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved from http://www.technologyreview.com/hack/418552/build-your-own-cellular-network/