Internet Engineer and Moonlight Academic
Hi everyone, Today, the rubber hits the road! My partner, Audrey, and I spent all Saturday running last minute errands, sending last-minute email questions (“should I bring a camping stove or not?”) and packing all sorts of equipment into two rubbermaid totes and our personal bags. Packing’s been a comically awkward fusion of my outdoor...
https://www.seattlemag.com/news-and-features/uw-researchers-big-idea-expanding-cell-phone-service
This post is the third in a three-part series about the financial side of things. In Part 1, talked about the systems we built for us to monitor network usage and for our users to buy and sell credit. In Part 2, we covered our operating expenses, and discussed some of the different considerations and...
This post is Part 2 in a series about money and billing. Part 1 talked about the technical system we built, and how users purchase data and transfer credit. In this post, I’m going to talk about the basic economics behind our network, including what our expenses look like, what kind of revenue we need...
https://www.geekwire.com/2018/building-cell-tower-box-connect-billions-people-lacking-internet-access/
Okay, okay, let’s talk about money… everyone’s favorite topic, right? No, but seriously: In all my efforts to get CoLTE up and talking to phones, I didn’t really think about the (glaringly obvious) fact that for us to offer service to the community, we’ll have to pay for it somehow. That means building a billing...
One of the most interesting and hardest-to-describe things about local networks, as opposed to big-scale national ones, is exactly how they connect to the rest of the world. More than any other part of this project, the answer to these kinds of questions is “it depends!” In this post, I’m going to do my best...
One of the coolest and most interesting parts of building CoLTE was the process of designing and purchasing our own SIM cards (1,000 of them, to be precise). Even though the SIM cards are a relatively small part of the whole technical system, they make a great visual, especially with our own design on them....
Hi everyone! My name’s Spencer, I’m a postdoc at the University of Washington, and I’m super excited to introduce the Community LTE Project (CoLTE, pronounced colt-ee). I’ll be writing about CoLTE a lot over the coming years, with two main goals. First, we want to keep everyone informed of the project development, major milestones, and...
This post is also published on the UW ICTD Blog here. When it comes to frequency regulation, the FCC has to be strict — but its coarse-grained approach to licensing harms the small-scale hobbyist community. It could stand to learn a thing or two from the FAA on this issue.