Blogs

In the developing world, cell phones come before land lines. Why? Because installing cell towers is cheaper than running landlines. But even with lower costs, telecom companies avoid the poorest and hardest-to-reach areas. Where they do provide coverage, it's expensive, especially for the 3 billion people in the world who earn about $3 per day.

A small team of telecom industry veterans has solved both of those problems. The team developed OpenBTS, an open-source, software-based cellphone network. Not only does it cost one-tenth as much as traditional networks, but carriers could charge callers about $2 per month and still make a profit.

[...]

Full article:

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/news/2010/06/21/open_source_cell_ph...

La Quadrature du Net reports on today's decision of the ITRE committee on amendments to the first Radio Spectrum Policy Programme.

Several amendments, in particular regarding the use of White Spaces, mesh networks and the need for more general authorisation spectrum, were accepted in ITRE.

http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Free_Spectrum_Applications

OSA welcomes ITRE's landmark decision which is a great success for the European civil society.

We would like to thank all the people involved and we're looking forward to the adoption of the ITRE report in the EP's plenary meeting on June 6.

The Open Spectrum Alliance is applying as a mentoring organization for Google's Summer of Code 2011.

Paul Fuxjaeger, OSA member and researcher at FTW (Vienna Telecommunications Research Center) has proposed several ideas and volunteered to mentor students during SoC 2011.

These are the ideas for 2011:

WiFi context

Idea 1

802.11 Load balancing on standard MIPS AP platforms (based on OpenWRT)
A scheduler that does not differentiate between traffic classes but takes
into account the rate-adaption and balances the amounts or radio "airtime"
that are shared amongs clients
Task: Modify a OpenWRT AP to do all that.

Idea 2

802.11 Self-advertising beacon framework on standard MIPS platforms ...

The Open Spectrum Alliance, together with The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative (OTI), Global Partners & Associates, Open Rights Group, Hispalinux, and EFF Finland filed a response to the EC's questionnaire on the open Internet and net neutrality.

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/policy/ecomm/library/public_cons...

The IEEE 802.11 Working Group, on its way to 5 Gb/s, Celebrates 20 Years of Contributions to Wireless LANs.

http://standards.ieee.org/announcements/2010/20anniv.html

Thanks for making the huge success of WiFi possible, and keep up the good work!

The Open Spectrum Alliance and the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative filed a joint response to OFCOM's discussion paper on network neutrality.

Press release | May 2010

Silver Jubilee of the rules that enabled Wi-Fi

On May 24, 2010 it will be exactly 25 years since the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the regulator of the radio spectrum for public use in the USA, released the decision to permit unlicensed access to the radio spectrum for communications, provided the devices use “Spread Spectrum”.

That paved the way for the IEEE 802.11 committee to start developing “Wi-Fi” – an interoperability standard for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) – which encouraged regulators in other countries to adopt similar rules. Canada and the European countries agreed first, then dozens more governments allowed license-free use of the radio spectrum by WLANs.

Attached is our response to the European Commission's consultation which ended 7 May 2010.

The German national Radio had a report on the 800Mhz spectrum auction run by the Bundesnetzagentur including a short statement of Alexander List from Open Spectrum Alliance.

You can find the podcast here: http://ondemand-mp3.dradio.de/file/dradio/2010/04/12/dlf_20100412_0545_0...

The attached file was submitted last night.

The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative has published an analysis of the US National Broadband Plan.

The Open Spectrum Alliance has drafted a position paper for the EU Spectrum Summit in Brussels, March 22-23, 2010.

Open Spectrum Alliance has filed a
response to the RSPG's report on Cognitive Technologies.

Folks, this is last minute, but please take a look at the attached draft file, which I think is ready to go unless you have further changes to suggest. SE43 will meet 20-21 October and we should have input to that meeting if we want to be involved in the standards setting. Post your comments here, or to the email list, today if possible. Thanks. >BOB<

Futurezone Article: Freie Frequenzen für ein freies Netz:
http://futurezone.orf.at/stories/1628079/
Programme description (in German): http://oe1.orf.at/programm/200909277101.html
Announcement in ORF ON Futurezone: http://futurezone.orf.at/tipps/stories/1628086/