Out in the Open: This Super-Cheap Cellphone Network Brings Coverage Almost Anywhere

OpenBTS and YateBTS help communities replace expensive cellular network infrastructure with open source software. Image: mayo5/Getty

Antarctica is probably the last place you’d expect cellphone service. But thanks to the Australian government and a company called Range Networks, you’ll soon be able to find a signal near several research facilities on the continent.

Range has already brought GSM service–the same type of network that carries voice calls and text messages elsewhere in the world–to Macquarie Island, a small island just outside the Antarctic Circle. This is preferable to walkie talkies or Wi-Fi because it provides wider coverage while using less energy. And although the network has a satellite uplink to connect it with the rest of the world, it doesn’t depend on satellites for local communications, which is essential to the safety of field researchers.

GSM networks like the one on the island usually cost about a million dollars to build, says Range Networks CEO Ed Kozel. But Range is able to bring the technology to Antarctica for just a few thousand dollars using an open source platform called OpenBTS, short for Open Base Transceiver Station. All you need to run a GSM network with OpenBTS is radio software and an off-the-shelf Linux server. “The legacy infrastructures are why most operators are so expensive to run, but we took a clean slate approach,” Kozel explains.

Thanks to its barebones approach, the technology is a way of bringing cell service to all sorts of remote populations, from Antarctica to rural Indonesia. Big telecommunications companies are unlikely to build traditional networks in such places because they just wouldn’t be profitable. But the economics of open source are very different.

From Indonesia to Iceland

OpenBTS was created by Range Networks co-founder David Burgess in 2008, when he realized he could replace much of the traditional infrastructure involved in cellular networks with software. “My first encounter with mobile networks was in the defense contracting world,” says Burgess, who has since left the company to found a new venture called Legba. “I fell in love with the technology very quickly, but the way GSM was deployed–and still is in the traditional world–is fairly inefficient. There’s a lot of things that made sense back in the 80s when computers were very expensive and consumed a lot of power, but just don’t make sense today.”

Image: Range Networks

Though OpenBTS is typically used remote areas with low populations, it has also inspired some other, unexpected uses. A search and rescue team in Iceland, for instance, used the software to turn one of its helicopters into a flying cellphone tower that can be used to triangulate the location of missing persons.

And yes, the software can be used by hackers to hijack people’s phone calls by spoofing cellphone towers. “It’s not the intent for the company, but because the software is open source, people can do that,” Kozel acknowledges. But the benefits of bringing wireless connectivity to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it, he says, is worth the trade-off.

The Next Step

While Range Networks continues to build new networks in remote areas, Burgess has turned his attention to another problem. He says many network operators are planning to switch over to the widely used LTE cellular standard and shut down their GSM networks in order to save money and open up more of the wireless spectrum for LTE. But many of those networks, he explains, aren’t planning to replace the GSM infrastructure in rural locations with newer LTE infrastructure, which will leave customers in those areas without any access.

After leaving Range last year, Burgess is now focused on a new open source creation called YateBTS. This platform combines code from OpenBTS with another open source project called Yate, which is short for Yet Another Telephony Engine. Burgess says Yate, which was developed by Romanian company NullTeam, acts something like a translator between different types of telecommunications protocols. This lets YateBTS integrate with other network standards.

Burgess hopes Legba, which he started to commercialize YateBTS, will be able to provide network operators with a way of running GSM networks on the same infrastructure, and even within the same spectrum, as their LTE networks. But his ambition is greater than that. He’d also like to revolutionize infrastructure the way Android has revolutionized mobile computing. “What Android did for the handset world was enable a whole new wave of companies and technologies it produced a lot of new products and new competition in the smart phone market,” he says. “What Android did for the handsets we’d like to do for the network.”