Call for Action! - Team Infrastructure

Price-ber-bit for voice vs. sms vs. gprs etc.

pokharel@fas.harvard.edu — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 15:08:18 +0000

Another idea that came out of the talk that Katrin gave last week was the possibility of evaluating the mobile telecommunications networks on their costs. Just simply: what price brackets do telecommunication operators offer per bit on the different communication chnanels? This will help us see what telecommunications company think are expensive bits, and what are inexpensive bits.

Some of these are probably reasonably expensive bits (think about the US now): voice-lines during the day. Some of these are probably unreasonably expensive bits (again US thinking): SMS without an unlimited plan.

Would be fun to look at how the bit-pricing varies across characteristics about how the bits are transferred around the world, and probably make some interesting visualizations of this data.

Data over the GSM voice line (or more generally, a switchbox)

pokharel@fas.harvard.edu — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:21:15 +0000

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.

tech ideas...

nekkyo@mit.edu — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:38:23 +0000

I think my main interest is to just play around and learn about ways to use technology. I'm primarily interested in the technology aspect rather than the actual application of the technology. If you have an idea for an application that you may find useful, let me know. I might be interested in helping with the technology side. ^_^;
~Lindsay