Rowetel and the Dili Village Telco

Over the past several weeks I haven't had any time to work on my own projects, so I don't have anything exciting to report there. However I wanted to share a very interesting blog that I have been reading for a while called "Rowetel". It's the blog of a guy in Australia named David Rowe who has a lot of history in the telecommunications industry.

He frequently writes articles about the electric vehicle conversions he built as well as several items about telephony. He and his wife have been working in Dili attempting to deploy mesh network based telecommunications system built on several pieces of hardware he has designed and manufactured. Apparently in developing countries there is cellular phone service mostly available but it is extremely expensive. Also apparently most areas have no local communications infrastructure so cellular must be used for all calls. David's work uses Wifi technologies to create mesh networks capable of using voice over IP to make local calls.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention that David has been working on an ultra low bandwidth speech based, open source audio codec as well called Codec2!

I would recommend you head over to Rowetel and check it out.