MobileActive's Blog

Open Source Cellphone Networks are Now on Every Continent

Posted by admin on Jun. 07, 2011
open BTS

[This post was written by Robert Goodier and originally appeared on Engineering for Change. It is reposted here with permission.]

Three men who believe that cellphone service should be cheap and accessible to everyone have found a way to make it happen. The creators of OpenBTS, the open-source cellphone network, launched a startup and have delivered cheap cellphone networks to the world's biggest mobile tech corporations, governments and other clients on every continent. (Yes, even Atarctica—the Australian base is connected via OpenBTS.)

As we reported last year, OpenBTS is a network built on open-source software and hardware that works seamlessly with the average cellphone. With smart coding and decentralized call processing, the system has reduced the hardware needed and cuts the cost of installing and running a cellphone network to about one-tenth that of a traditional setup.

And, importantly for developing countries, the base tranceivers (the gear in the cell towers) are energy sippers that can run on PV cells. The bottom line: The whole network can reduce the cost of service to about $2-3 per month for subscribers.

We spoke with Glenn Edens, a co-founder of Range Networks, with a resume that includes such titles as former head of Sun Lab at Sun Microsystems, former president of AT&T Strategic Ventures, Chief of Strategic Technology at Hewlett-Packard and others. Edens summed up the last six months at Range Networks and told us what lies ahead for the startup.

cell service Democratic Participation Disaster & Humanitarian Relief Health Livelihood & Economic Development mobile networks openBTS opensource

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The Mobile Minute: Crowdsourcing the Turkish Elections, Mubarak Fined by Egyptian Courts, and The Importance of Mobile Broadband
Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Jun. 02, 2011

[Updated with audio recording: If you'd like to hear this Mobile Minute in audio form, check out this podcast recorded by Ashiyan Rahmani-Shirazi @ashiyan]

Mobile Minute - 2nd June 2011 by ashiyan

Today's Mobile Minute brings you coverage on Egypt's ruling against former president Mubarak for cutting Internet and mobile services, the rise of online phone calls, the operating system with the most data downloads, an effort to crowdsource citizen reports from the upcoming Turkish elections, and a look at mobile web content and access in East Africa.

  • Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has been fined $34 million by an Egyptian court for cutting access to Internet and mobile phone networks during protests earlier this year. Other Egyptian officials (former interior minister Habib al-Adly and former prime minister Ahmed Nazif) were fined as well, for a total of $90 million in fines among the three former leaders.
  • A new report from the Pew Research Center reveals that online phone calls are becoming much more common. The center reports that 5% of Internet users go online to make a phone call each day, and 24% of adult American Internet users have used the Internet to make a phone call.
  • Curious about which operating system users download the most data? Wonder no more – Android owners use roughly 582 MB of data each month, compared to Apple users who came next with 492 MB of data. The information, compiled by Nielsen, also found that although Android users use more data, iPhone owners downloaded more apps.
  • Turkey's elections are coming up on June 12th, and students at the Istanbul Bilgi University have launched a crowd-sourcing website in order to report on the election. Called CrowdMap, the site maps reports from SMS, email, Twitter, and other Internet sources to provide instant updates about the election outside of the mainstream media.
android Crowdsourcing data downloads Democratic Participation elections Mobile Minute Nielsen Pew vodafone

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June 2011 Mobile Events Round-Up
Posted by AnneryanHeatwole on Jun. 01, 2011
Events

It's a brand new month, and June is bursting with tons of mobile-themed events around the world! From hackathons for developers and coders to in-depth discussions about mobiles for social change and development, this month's events cover a wide range of topics and sectors. Check them out below:

1-2 June AppsWorld Africa 2011  (Cape Town, South Africa) How can mobile apps be used for development in Africa? This two-day conference uses workshops and exhibitions to explore the potential of apps in sectors ranging from health and agriculture to business and banking.

4-5 June Random Hacks of Kindness (global) This Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon will focus on both disaster risk and climate change. Experts in disaster risk and climate change submit challenges they've faced in their work, and developers and coders gather together to build solutions.

6-9 June Mobile Health Summit (Cape Town, South Africa) Co-hosted by the GSMA and the mHealth Alliance, this three-day event is the go-to place for leaders in the mobile and health fields to learn how mobile technology can improve on global health practices. 

8 June Mobile Applications for Development Workshop (Washington, D.C., USA) Hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank, this workshop focuses on the role of mobile and Internet technologies in fostering social development.

8-9 June Open Mobile Summit (London, UK) For businesses looking to create a mobile presence, the Open Mobile Summit covers all the bases. From workshops on monetizing apps to targeting audiences through social media, panel leaders discuss how to mobilize your business.

8-9 June AITEC Banking and Mobile Money: West Africa (Accra, Ghana) The theme of this two-day event is how mobile banking can drive trade and investment in West Africa. The event looks at how traditional banks can use mobile banking, and the benefits of providing mobile banking options for people at the bottom of the pyramid.

14-15 June PIVOT25 (Nairobi, Kenya) PIVOT25 is an mLAB dedicated to supporting the growth of mobile entrepreneurs in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Somalia and Southern Sudan. Discussion topics at the event include the role of women in ICTs and the use of mobile applications in government, health, banking, and games.

Democratic Participation event listings events Health June mobile conference roundup

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Evaluating Mobile Info Channels for Indian Farmers
Posted by MohiniBhavsar on May. 31, 2011

As part of the connected MobileActive.org community of practice, we feature relevant mobile research. If you've been following our Mobile Research At Your Desk Series, you already have a sense of wide range of articles that we've gathered in the mDirectory. (For a full list, see below!)

This slidecast outlines findings from a large-scale study carried out by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.  Sanjay Gandhi, Gaurav Tripathi, and Dr. Surabhi Mittal interviewed 200 small scale farmers to highlight the best uses of mobiles to support agricultural productivity. 

The authors organized 17 focus groups over four months across India, and conducted 46 individual interviews with subsistence farmers. In total, they spoke to 200 people, living in villages where both mobile services and agricultural information sources are available. Farmers grew a wide of crops and average household incomes varied. The researchers partnered with organizations that provided agricultural information services linked to mobile phones.

For a quick overview of the results watch our slidecast below (5.04) or read the complete article in the mDirectory.

We have gathered over 230 journal articles, evaluations and reports on mobiles for development in the mDirectory - a one-stop literature bank on mobiles in social change useful for practitioners and NGOs.

In our "Mobile Research At Your Desk" series, we've featured the work of researchers in the ICT4D field, covering a range of applications.  Here's a list of our slidecasts to date:

Fisher Friend Livelihood & Economic Development m-agriculture market information market prices research at your desk subsistence farmers

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Defend Your TopScore in Dr Math's Textual Math Adventures
Posted by MohiniBhavsar on May. 24, 2011

We have gathered over 200 journal articles, evaluations and reports on mobiles for development in the mDirectory - a one-stop literature bank on mobiles in social change useful for practitioners and NGOs.

In our "Mobile Research At Your Desk" series, we've featured the work of researchers in the ICT4D field, covering a range of applications. To recap, here's a list of our slidecasts:

The fifth slidecast focuses on the work of Laurie Butgereit. She developed Dr. Math, an educational tool for South African youth, based on the popular mobile instant messaging service called MXit. The report was presented at the IST-Africa Conference in 2009.

Dr Math Education

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SMSTester for Android: Project and Source Now Open

Posted by SaferMobile on May. 18, 2011

One of the main goals of the SaferMobile project is to release software tools that allow activists and rights defenders to use their mobile phones as network monitors and sensors. The goal is to help them, and the mobile developers, human rights organizations and people on the street they work with, to monitor network performance and proactively detect blocking, filtering and censorship. SMSTester is the first tool we are publicly releasing within this category, and it is free, freely licensed and open-source. Our first trial run with Short Message Service Tester (SMSTester) was completed in April 2011. The results are written up here.

Advocacy Citizen Media Democratic Participation Disaster & Humanitarian Relief Education Environment Health latency Livelihood & Economic Development network reliability safermobile SMSTester testing

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SMSTester for Android: Project and Source Now Open

Posted by SaferMobile on May. 18, 2011

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Mobiles for Women, Part Two: The Darker Side

Posted by MelissaUlbricht on May. 17, 2011

Targeting women with mobile phones and mobile-based projects can bring great benefits and opportunities, as we outlined in Part 1 of our series on women and mobiles. But, there is a “darker side” to this world, which includes changes in gender relations and power dynamic, a potential increase in violence, substitution of money or a change in expenditures, invasion of privacy, and increased control by a male partner.

Changes in Gender Relations and Power Dynamics

When the traditional social dynamic of a household is patriarchal, introducing a mobile phone into the hands of the woman can challenge the existing gender structure. Trina DasGupta, mWomen Programme Director for the GSMA Development Fund, writes in an e-mail to MobileActive.org, “threats to the status quo have sometimes been viewed negatively by community leaders and we have seen examples of this gender discrimination manifesting itself when women gain greater access to empowering tools, such as the Internet or mobile phones.”  

Women themselves may not agree. The GRACE project study in Kenya, for example, finds that women do not perceive mobiles at tools for males. “Unlike our literature review that suggested that the mobile phone is culturally construed as a male tool, the women entrepreneurs did not perceive the phone as such. However, the study does indicate that usage of the phone is culturally construed, with an increase in responsibilities and empowerment for one or other profession socially construed as women’s work.”

A paper by Aramanzan Madanda looks at gender relations and ICT adoption in Uganda (the work will soon be published in book format) and finds that “existing gender structures have been dented and that patriarchy is stressed by adoption of the technologies especially mobile phones leading to transformation of gender relations to an extent.”  

Advocacy danger Democratic Participation Education family female gender Health household ict Livelihood & Economic Development mobile technology violence woman women

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Introducing SaferMobile: Mobile Security for Rights Defenders, Activists, and Journalists
Posted by SaferMobile on May. 16, 2011

Activists, rights defenders, and journalists use mobile devices for reporting, organizing, mobilizing, and documenting. We have written about many of these uses for years now, describing how mobile phones provide countless benefits to activists and rights defenders. Mobile tech is relatively low cost and allows for increased efficiencies and vast reach, for example. But, there is a darker side.

Mobile Phones present specific risks to rights defenders, journalists, and activists. We believe that is is critically important to know that mobile communication is inherently insecure and exposes rights defenders and those working in sensitive environment to risks that are not easy to detect or overcome. 

To address mobile safety and security for rights defenders, we are introducing SaferMobile, to help activists, human rights defenders, and journalists assess the mobile communications risks that they are facing, and then use appropriate mitigation techniques to increase their ability to organize, report, and work more safely.

What is SaferMobile? 

  • Online and offline educational and tactical resources (risk evaluation tools, case studies, how-to guides, security tool reviews); 
  • Trainings and curricula for use in various countries and with different constituencies; 
  • Specific mobile security software focused on the needs of rights defenders, activists, and journalists.

As will all that we do, we believe that there certain values and principles that are paramount in this work. For SaferMobile, we are following these principles:

  • We believe that skilled, trained, and knowledgeable activists, journalists, and rights defenders are key to democratic changes. We also believe that the smart and effective use of technology constitutes an integral piece of their skill set.
  • The better activists, journalists, and rights defender are able to work, the more safely they are able to organize and communicate, the more likely it is that their work is effective and heard. 
  • We are committed to accessible, useful, actionable, and technically accurate and secure content, materials, and software. 
  • We are also committed to describing technological vulnerabilities in terms that non-technical users can easily understand. 
  • We work with activists on the ground to ensure that the content we produce addresses real uses and risks. 
  • We also seek responsive connections between activists and security professionals so that both are more able to assess and respond to changing risks.  
  • Lastly, we are maintaining information that reflects current security risks and technological vulnerabilities and is vetted for security and technological accuracy by knowledgeable experts.

Roadmap and Process

The SaferMobile project is just beginning its second Phase. Phase 1 included needs assessment with users and peers – activists, rights defenders, journalists, technologists, security experts, and mobile developers. Through this research, we outlined plans for web content, training curriculum and tools (software) and are now creating these pieces in Phase 2 of the project (May-August 2011). 

Our approach is iterative and open – we work as a team to develop ideas and welcome review and comments from peers. 

Advocacy citizen journalism Citizen Media Democratic Participation human rights introduction mobile safety mobile security safermobile safermobile.org wiki

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Mobiles for Women. Part 1: The Good.
Posted by MelissaUlbricht on May. 11, 2011

A village in India last year banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they would arrange forbidden marriages. The village council suspected young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange to elope. Meanwhile, unmarried men could use mobile phones under parental supervision.

As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater sense of security and safety.

But, there is a darker side. Targeting women with mobile phones can cause changes in gender dynamics and family expenditures and may relate to increases in domestic violence, invasion of privacy, or control by a male partner.

Advocacy Democratic Participation domestic family female gender household ict Livelihood & Economic Development male mobile mwomen sexual technology violence woman women

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