gsm mesh network without cell towers or telcos

Robin Paulson robin.paulson at gmail.com
Tue Jul 13 07:30:32 CEST 2010


i heard about this on radio nz national yesterday: a uni researcher in
australia has designed and implemented a system for building
distributed, de-centralised mesh networks out of (so i understand it)
gsm phones

yes,
no cell towers needed
no telcos needed

i can't find much on him, beyond his web page at the university:
http://www.flinders.edu.au/people/paul.gardner-stephen

which has these snippets:

# Implementing the Mesh Potato feature-set on Android based smart
phones to enable the creation of mixed mobile and land-line
self-meshing ad-hoc telephone networks
# Creating distributed infrastructure-free protocols that allow people
to use their existing telephone numbers on ad-hoc telephone networks,
both for temporary disaster-relief telephony and ad-hoc telephony for
remote and emerging regions.

he talks about using it for disaster relief, but i think that's a
trivial use: breaking the stranglehold of mobile telcos over us is far
more venerable

has anyone else heard of this? does anyone else have better google
skills and can find more?

i'd love to see this or an equivalent on the openmoko. now *that*
would 'free my phone'



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