HOOKED ON MOBILE

In August of 2008 Harvind Samra and David A. Burgess went to Black Rock City (Yes, Burning Man) and successfully tested 120 phones using what is now officially the first open source GSM in the world. If you are asking yourself what the hell is a GSM? according to Wikipedia GSM stands for “Global System for Mobile communications: originally from Groupe Spécial Mobile. Is the most popular standard for mobile phones in the world. Its promoter, the GSM Association, estimates that 80% of the global mobile market uses the standard.” to put it into plain english OpenBTS is a software-based GSM access point, allowing standard GSM-compatible mobile phones to make telephone calls without using existing telecommunication providers’ networks. Sorry I need to stress this part again “make telephone calls without using existing telecommunication providers’ networks.” and still be compatible with most of the handsets that are already in the market. To make this even better, at 1/10 of the cost of current technologies.

Of course this doesn’t sit well with a large group of companies, in particular with Martone Radio technology, Inc. a former consulting for whom David Burgess wrote a GSM stack prior to his work on OpenBTS. On 3 December 2008 Massimiliano Martone filed a lawsuit, claiming OpenBTS contains propietary information that belongs to him. The OpenBTS however, declared to transferred the copyrights to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) on 24 October 2008. Today David or Harvind are not allowed to tell the people where the code is. However still available (if you are smart enough to find it) for anonymous download.

It doesn’t matter anymore if OpenBTS is on stand-by for reaching its full potential. At least it’s proven that an independent GSM is possibe and somewhere somehow someone will come up the answer of how to move this forward or at least with a similar solution. It’s just a matter of time.

If you want to help this guys with the legal battle, it is possible to donate some money through Pay Pal. After all, this can be your personal investment for future free cell coverage.

Why is this important? an inexpensive and open source GSM can help bring cell phones to remote areas and developing countries where carriers see no money to be made. Also, there are vast possibilities for other applications, like communication for special events, private networks, temporary networks… and stuff we can’t even begin to imagine. Obviously, this is where regulation comes in just to make everything mainstream and boring.