The Mesh-Potato Router and the Villagetelco

The average Kenyan spends more than 50% of their disposable income on mobile services.

Villagetelco Workshop June 2008

Idea: Build a open-hardware and open-software toolkit to empower communities, NGOs, entrepreneurs to set up their own telephone networks using unlicensed WiFi band.

The Mesh-Potato is a MESH networking POTS (Plain Old Telephone system) ATA (Analog Telephone adaptOr)

Infrastructure vs ad-hoc mode Adhoc Infrastructure

Infrastructure mode Accesspoint A B B is out of range Now if B could communicate with the rest of the network via A... X Y G Point-to-multipoint mode

Multipoint-to-Multipoint networking - denominated „Ad-Hoc“ mode in Ad-Hoc versus managed mode A B C D E A can talk to B and C. A can not (yet) talk to D and E and vice versa.

Mesh: Routing added to multipoint-to-multipoint networking A B C D E Since the nodes can talk multipoint-to-multipoint, every node can serve as a relay for any other node in range.

Network topology of Freifunk mesh in Berlin

Villagetelco goals: ● Self sustaining business (viral growth) ● Scalable up and down ● Business for a reasonably geeky ● entrepreneur ● $5,000 Capital ● 6 months break even ● Small Telco business for 2 nd or 3 rd world ● Grounded in business (not tech or charity)

Server 40 Mesh Potatoes SuperNode Village Telco Kit

Dabba ● dabba.co.za have a prototype Village Telco network in actual commercial operation ● Orange farm, township near Johannesburg ● uses commodity hardware and open source software ● free local calls ● pre-paid vouchers for calls to other networks

Mesh Potato Design ● Low Cost, Atheros AR2317 SoC ● 9-40V DC input range ● Patched MadWifi driver in Ahdemo mode ● FXS port interface connected via GPIO ports and RS232 with glue logic ● Atmel Atmega8 uC ● Foolproof inputs and outputs ● Hacker-friendly JTAG access to components

FXS Port Atheros SoC 16M SDRAM 8M SPI Flash Glue Logic Ethernet bg

Links ● Village Telco Google Group ● shuttleworthfoundation.org ● villagetelco.org ● manypossibilities.net ● open-mesh.net/batman ● dabba.co.za ● rowetel.com

This slide-show was created by shameless copying, pasting, adding and modifying slides by Steve Song and David Rowe. More information, source code, schematics and so on at: That's it for now, folks! Questions?

Creative Commons before the Internet... by Esthr BY NC network neurons 2 by gerard79gerard BY Informal Settlement - by imraani flickr.com/photos/la_grasse_matinee/ BY NC SA