Friday, January 6th we will once again be joined by Steve Song of The Village Telco. Steve last appeared in November 2009 to tell us about The Village Telco and their innovative, open source hardware called the Mesh Potato. Since that time Mesh Potatoes have started shipping and the project has made considerable progress.

In addition, Steve recently appeared at an African conference presenting on the importance of RF “white spaces” to the future of telecom in Africa. The white spaces debate there is very similar to similar issues faced in North America.

The initial question must be , “why does this matter?” Will the entrenched powers lock everyone else out of the RF landscape through the regulatory system? Or will a more open approach prevail?

Friday September 17th we will have a second, special edition VUC call at a special time. The guest for this hour will be David Rowe of Rowetel.

David’s accomplishments in telecom are many and varied. He’s the man behind the open source hardware that is the ATCOM IP0x range of embedded Asterisk appliances. He’s one of the architects of the “Mesh Potato” hardware at the core of the Village Telco Project (Steve Song, VUC Nov 2009) His efforts in the realm of software include the Open Source Line Echo Canceller (OSLEC) and a wholly new open source, low-bitrate voice codec (Codec2.)

David is presently just completing a trip to Extreme Com 2010 in Northern India. He’s recently posted some very interesting notes on his personal blog.

Since David resides in Adelaide, Australia this call will be at a special time which has yet to be confirmed. It will most likely be at 7am Adelaide time,  which is  5:30pm US EDT, 2:30pm PDT, 10:30pm London, and 11:30pm in Paris.

Stephen Song of The Shuttleworth Foundation jopined us to discuss The Village Telco Project, an effort to use OSS VoIP hardware and software to supply network & voice services to rural parts of Africa.

The project involves hardware designed by Australia’s David Rowe and manufactured by in China by ATCOM. It runs an embedded Asterisk distribution.

Village Telco is an initiative to assemble/develop the cheapest, easiest to setup, easiest to manage, scalable, Open Source, standards-based, wireless local do-it-yourself telephone company toolkit in the world.  The goal of the project is to render local telephony in developing countries to be so cheap as to be virtually free.  Thanks to advances in Open Source telephony software and the dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless broadband technology, we think this is entirely possible.

The project consists of three principle elements

1. Simplified Billing System for Selling Pay-as-you-go Voice Services

   This element will make a contribution to the excellent A2Billing Open Source project. Work on this project will result in a guided installation wizard for people with limited technical skills and a simple administration and billing interface for business managers.

2. Mesh Potato – A low-cost wireless mesh device you can plug a regular phone into

This is described in the Mesh Potato project page. In a nutshell, the Village Telco needs an affordable device to connect customers to the meshed WiFi network. The Mesh Potato will dramatically reduce the cost of a Village Telco startup

3. Easy-to-use GIS-based Mesh Management Interface

We are partnering with the CSIR-supported Afrimesh project which is developing a fast, easy-to-use, low-overhead management dashboard which enables mesh network operators to create and sustain a resilient communications network with a minimum of fuss.

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Part 1: [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-285270.mp3|titles=Village Telco Project - Steve Song]

Part 2: [audio:http://media.blubrry.com/winelover/recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-22622/TS-289673.mp3|titles=Part 2 Nov 6 2009]

IRC Transcript 20091106