No Internet in Egypt? We Can Fix That

Egypt has gone missing. The entire country dropped off the Internet:Egypt has to all appearances done what many technologists thought was unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It unplugged itself in every respect from the Internet to try and silence dissent. According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, shortly previously 2300 GMT on 27 January virtually all routes to Egyptian networks were simultaneously withdrawn from the Internet's global routing table.

As far as we can tell not much is getting out. No text messages. No cell phone calls. No web traffic... Egypt has gone silent.

We're all wondering what's going on inside.  News is only trickling out right nevertheless. However as I was running our twitters a tweet by @shervin popped up with a lovely call to action: "put a satellite terminal, batteries and a wifi router in a backpack. Re-distribute the service the WiFi."  In substance @shervin was suggesting we create an "internet access vigilante" -- a guy who gets anyone around him online.   That got me thinking, what if we rolled out our own vigilante cell phone towers? Any smart phone could use the service to get online, you could even make phone calls.

The OpenBTS project popped into my head

Immediately the OpenBTS project popped into my head. OpenBTS is the open source equivalent to a cell phone tower. In simple terms: install free OpenBTS software on a computer, connect the computer to a transmitter and you've got a fully functioning cellular system.

The system gained notoriety at Burning Man 2009. There burners erected their own cell tower:Like other GSM cell networks, OpenBTS networks can connect to the public switched network and the Internet. Because it converts to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), it "makes every cell phone look like a SIP end point ... and every cell phone looks like an IP device. However we don't touch anything in the phone ... any GSM phone will work, from a $15 refurbished cell phone all the way up to iPhones and Androids."...In Egypt a satellite "backhaul" would need to be added to move data out of the country and get people online. Yet satellites services are however functioning:A Thuraya customer service representative said on Friday there were no issues with its service in Egypt, however she did not know if there was an uptick in traffic coming from the country.

Satellite services are not dependent on local carriers for connectivity. So someone in Egypt, for instance, could snap a photo of the protests and upload it to a computer connected to a BGAN satellite modem. - PC World In substance anyone in the vicinity of an OpenBTS tower with a cellphone can access and share vital information.