mobile phone

Black Rock City, Nevada - Burning Man is not just a case of alternative crops, it is more commercial cellular possibility, and it is the purists fuming.

For one week the participants to leave their jobs and more mundane issues, and immerse themselves in an alternate reality, the transformation of their creative energy and inspired by the surreal atmosphere. 


a remote area, 140 miles from the nearest town (Reno) in the northern Nevada desert, makes it easy to avoid. Meanwhile, the prohibition of trade (except ice and coffee from the organizers) is designed to wean people away from capitalism in favor of more idealistic gift and barter society.

Now that was burned 23 years after the first man, the real world seems to be intruding on this event as the first commercial cellular.

August 20, Comments wireless installed a temporary cell tower on the right of private land near the site of Burning Man in the hot springs is called the frog pond, Mark Hansen, vice president of network operations at the wholesale wireless communications, announced on Thursday. Tower, sitting on the trailer and powered by the sun and the wind passes through the satellite to the mobile phone network, "he said.

The company has a permanent cell tower above the Empire, Nevada, about 15 miles from Burning Man, "he said. But the company would be interested to know what the demand was at the event, and even more so, I wanted to test technology that could be used to serve remote areas, such as an Indian reservation in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, he said.

There were technical problems, and this service may offer only voice and not data via satellite, according to Hansen. People in the area made and received about 300,000 calls during the events, he said. CommNet was expected demand for two or three times, he added.

CommNet plans to remove the cell tower next week and probably will not return to Burning Man next year.

"Now, I think we will lose money" as a result of the cost of deployment significantly exceeds the amount of roaming, "he said. "If we can not make money, we do not come back."

The company appealed to the Burning Man organization about the project in advance and was told that the event was not interesting to be there, "said Hansen.


Electronics for cellular towers OpenBTS project located in the three cases are being made to protect against damage from dust storms.

(Credit: Dave Simon) "is a culture where they want people to leave their phones, and we can understand that," he said.

Meanwhile, the comments served to Burning Man theme camp called Pope Legba, which held a free limited voice and text service as part of an open source network called OpenBTS projects to make sure that these two services do not interfere with each other.

Although the majority of rural communities will welcome the arrival of such a service, many residents of Burning Man were not satisfied.

"Maybe I'm an old fart, but it will be very sad to see a lot of removing themselves from the experience that is Burning Man", wrote "DoctorIknow" on board the discussion ePlaya. ( "Playa" is what members called an ancient lake bed known as the Black Rock Desert, where there is an event.) "I hear it everywhere I go, shouting a phone ... I'd rather sleep next to a generator."

Other publications on board was short and sweet: "Hang up and participate."

One Burning Man volunteer said she was "bummed Out", when he saw someone check my iPhone, when he was driving art. Cellular phone service is going to "change the culture" of an event, she complained.

Asked to comment on this question at a press conference last week's event, Burning Man founder Larry Harvey predicted that participants would police themselves to keep mobile phones in check.

"You can not F ** K on the road, you can not Sh * t on the road, and you can not use your mobile phone on the road," he said with blatant disgust. "This is a private function. Do this in a tent!"

Not all of the estimated 42,000 visitors in this year's event were against the provider.

During the service spotty and unreliable, my camp was able to arrive too late to ask friends with text messages, to bring more supplies and to receive a phone call from a friend to tell us that she will not be able to make his event, in the end.

It was strange to hear the phone ring, as we sat in our camp, but it is also a country with two fans blowing on us and refilling tablespoons of cold water cooler - a luxury, which led to be on grid near the center of the camp.

I they see anyone checking phone messages, as we waited for several hours, the dust storms to subside so the person can be burned in the night from Saturday. But I do not see people staring at their IPHONES as they drank their coffee in the cafe, the center of the camp during the day.

For some, the emergence of cellular was inevitable.

Theme (from Burning Man) is the evolution and adaptation, "said John Gilmore, one of the founders of Electronic Frontier Foundation, civil libertarian and open-source advocate. "Get Used To It".


Gilmore was hanging in the camp of Papa Legba, where 70-foot tower shone text messages and voice calls through a small GSM network administered OpenBTS project.

Service, which operates only about half the time, allowed the participants to send text messages and make 30-second calls to the other at the event. Users can also, theoretically, could get them from people from the outside world via Skype and Google Talk via iNum service, said David Burgess, a technical adviser and co-founder OpenBTS project.

"We are constantly fighting the heat and dust and infrastructure that are not quite there," he said.



With limited testing of voice services at Burning Man a year ago. "Our long-term goal is to provide a reference design for a type of cellular technology that is easy to deploy in remote areas, and inexpensive to operate," said Burgess.

Instead, to obtain an expanded agreement with telecommunications carrier access to the mobile switching center, OpenBTS paid a small sum by Link2VoIP, which provides a gateway between the Black Rock City Internet backbone and North POTS (plain old telephone system), according to Burgess.

When asked how to use the network OpenBTS grew at Burning Man, OpenBTS cofounder Harvind Samra said that every 10 minutes or so the phone call was made, and that there were 44 text messages waiting in line at a time.

With Gilmore, OpenBTS unable to add SMS capabilities to the service this year.

"I brought to the Internet (via satellite) here in 1999 and 2000, and initially, the reaction was terrible," said Gilmore. "They do not want people Geeking in their tents."

Not only the organization of Burning Man to use the Internet for many of its functions - such as tickets, distributing emergency and critical information and hosting webcam weather in nearby Gerlach - but the Internet allows the media by e-mail your stories printers for distribution in the newspapers at the event and publishing materials directly on the web, "he said.

"There is a culture of haves and have-nots," said Gilmore, obviously relishing the debate. "Burning Man staff with pagers and radios to talk with friends in Playa. The rest of us can, and I would like to do some leveling to do there so we can all communicate in Playa."

Burning Man survived the premature burning of Man (2007), anticlimactic existential crisis contributed by Renegade activists calling themselves the Borg 2 "(2005), and now Angst sounds generated by mobile phones ringing on the Playa.

What could be next?

"I do not care anyway about the cell phone service is available. I would keep my phone off and hidden, in spite of this," dj_john69 wrote on the discussion board ePlaya. "Now, if and when Starbucks shows up to the empire or Gerlach, that's where I Flip Out".