Alexander List's blog

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.

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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.

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.

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/

We have submitted a response to the RSPG's consultation on the coordination of EU spectrum interest:

http://rspg.groups.eu.int/_documents/consultations/comments_spectruminte...

Back in 2005, James E. Cooley looked at the (under)utilisation of the radio frequency spectrum in his master's thesis:

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33894

He isn't only documenting the utilisation of RF spectrum based on time, frequency and location, but also provides techniques for the detection of incumbent users.

So, most of the work necessary for my GNU Radio project on spectrum sensing has already been done...

Thanks to Andreas Müller for pointing me at this.

Curious as I am, I bought myself GNU Radio hardware (USRP) quite a while ago. Now I've also bought a TVRX, RFX400 and RFX900. Check out Ettus research's website for more info on the hardware.

After a few nights of experimenting, I reinstalled my MacBook, installed MacPorts, all dependencies and the recently released GNU Radio 3.2 from svn.

After solving some stupidity I finally managed to build it last night and tune in to a local FM radio station ;). For listening to radio an investment of USD 2k in hardware might be a little overkill.

I'd like to experiment with detection of incumbent users as described on the tools4sdr web site...

My plan looks somehow like this: