Low-Cost DIY Cell Network Runs On Solar 77
Shareable writes with word of the intriguing work of a Berkeley professor who has developed a "low-cost, low-power cell base station featuring easy, off-the grid deployment with solar or wind power; local services autonomous from national carriers; and an impressive portfolio of voice & data services (not just GSM). It's designed to connect rural areas in the developing world, but could have wider application like disaster recovery."
Re:Disaster Recovery? (Score:5, Insightful)
Look outside your tiny world a bit and realise that a large chunk of the world has settled on GSM for their phones.
A Quad-Band GSM phone would have no trouble connecting to something like this. With regards to licenses - if you're having to install something like this because of disaster recovery, then you can pretty much assume that any administrative level of government has its hands full with other stuff.
On a related note, there's an open-source GSM stack available, with a real-world island installation that (seems to) work fine -
http://openbts.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]