Call for Action!

The idea would be to develop some software or hardware to encode data over a GSM voice line.

A user would be able to connect to a cellphone's headset jack, and essentially use the cell phone as a modem. By using the voice line of the cell phone (available on any cell phone almost by definition), we can get digital information from place to place without having access to (often exhorbitatnly priced) data plans.
Cell phones can then be used, if paired with a phone number that acts as an Internet Service Provider on another end, to achieve internet access. This could be applicable in areas where there is GSM voice coverage, but not internet coverage. It could also be used to simply bypass the pricing scheme of data plans, or of internet availability.

The challenges in this project will be that we would need to figure out how to encode digital data on the GSM voice lines. The voice line is not a straight audio line that is fed through perfectly to the other side, it is encoded and decoded with certain protocols. The challenge will be to figure out a way to put digital data on the voice lines that survives all this network-level encoding and decoding.

The extension of this idea is the development of a universal switchbox, which would be able to translate between any channel (GSM voice, CDMA voice, SMS, TCP/IP, GSMA and other cell-phone level digital channels) to any other channel. Use can be to force networks to maintain fair pricing over the various channels.