More Open Telephony

We covered OpenBTS here. That was an FOSS based cellular implementation. The only problem? You have to be in a cellular free area to use it. (licensing/piracy issues for most in the US.)

Well fear not. We bump up against something slightly different will some folks over at Village Telco. The Village folks have married FOSS mesh networking AP with telephony for a FOSS based wireless telephony solution. That solution they call the Mesh Potato. They also have another effort to write code that is loaded right into the cell phone so that every phone becomes a mesh router.

Between the two techniques they open up some real possibilities. This is yet again why we at Third Pipe/Tightway has been advocating open frequencies on some bands. The point is this type of technology has the ability to usher in autonomous selfrouting wireless data/voice transmissions. The People build the network by their mere participation in the network itself.

More on their efforts here. Its a good read.