Burning Man and Communication: Cell phones on the playa

Filed Under Burning Man, Geek on 2008-09-11, 11:21

For those that aren’t familiar, Black Rock City is the temporary city that is built every year in the Black Rock Desert for Burning Man. I’ve been a couple times, skipped this year, but will probably be back in 2009 with Interpretive Arson. This year marked a strange year of communication from BRC. Those of us not out in the desert could watch live video streams, read twitters, look at photos uploaded to the Burning Man map on Flickr, and in some cases even talk to people on the playa. Much of this has been around in the past, with the wireless internet being available but spotty for a couple years, but it’s definitely starting to increase exponentially.

This year marked the first year that you could actually make and receive cell phone calls on the playa. This, like most everything on the playa, was of course not an official effort by the Burning Man Org. It was the work of the Open BTS Project. The Open BTS Project is “an effort to construct an open-source Unix application that uses the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) to present a GSM air interface (“Um”) to standard GSM handset and uses the Asterisk software PBX to connect calls”. In other words, open source software to run your own cell network. The purpose of this is admirable. A cheap and (eventually) easy way to setup cell networks in locations where they are needed. For more information, or to get involved, check out their page. What I love most about this project is that it is individuals putting together something that can be replicated without any corporations controlling the information. It’s a step towards side-stepping the huge telecommunications monopoly in order to provide communication for people who otherwise wouldn’t have it.

Of course this kind of project requires testing in order to know how it works. Black Rock City seemed to be the most appropriate location as it was in a remote area that didn’t have cell service, there were a large number of people, and a large percentage of these people had cell phones. On the flip-side, Black Rock Desert is also a challenging environment due to dust/heat/remoteness, and if you can get something working out on the playa, getting it to work in other environments can sometimes seem like child’s play.

Getting the service up and running was no easy task, and many problems were encountered. Generally the first thing I do when I arrive on the playa is to make sure my cell phone is off, I was surprised to hear that one of the problems that the OpenBTS guys ran into was people’s cell phones attempting to register with their tower. Eventually they started accepting phones onto the network rather than blocking them and due to some bugs they later found out that people were able to make outgoing calls simply by prefixing a 1 in front of the number they were dialing. A number of people figured this out and call logs showed about 120 phone calls to 95 different phone numbers all over the US. The service was finally shutdown around 10pm on Saturday night for the Man burn, and then packed up the next day.

While this probably gets all of us geeks and tech-heads excited about its success, the OpenBTS guys did not forget to touch on an important aspect of implementing this technology in a place where it was previously not available. The social aspect of having cell service on the playa is one that will change things a great deal. They relate a story of someone receiving a call while hanging out at Hookahdome and the rudeness of the interruption. Based on this and further reflection, it looks like in the future they will be focusing more on SMS functionality, and will ask people to turn off their audible ringers. However, having provisions to be able to connect voice calls could be useful for some people as it seems like hurricanes appear to strike elsewhere in the US while Burning Man happens.

Personally, from a geek standpoint I think this is awesome. However from a “Burner” perspective, Black Rock City is changing. Whether for better or worse is up to the individual to decide.

Comments

View Comments to “Burning Man and Communication: Cell phones on the playa”

Tawni on September 11th, 2008 8:55 pm

NO NO NO!
Not being connected to the outside world is one of the great beauties of BEing out there!
edrabbit on September 11th, 2008 9:01 pm

I agree, I will probably still be turning off my phone as soon as I turn off the pavement and won't turn it back on until I hit the pavement a week later.
Cat on September 12th, 2008 3:30 am

Please don't….It really makes no sense to me…Don't you all feel the ease of not having to hear the constant ringing of a phone….cut off conversations, because all the sudden it's like ” hold on I really hafta take this call”aaarrrggghhhh!!! Don't do it man-The playa is so much more cosmic than phones!! Seriously! Thats all I have to say about this issue..and I'm sure all the true Burners will agree fully with me, it's just silly.Live in the now-espeacially on the playa. it's our only sacred place of freedom, don't kill it.
~Kitty Cat
Halcyon on September 12th, 2008 11:18 am

it would be horrific.
We spend SO much effort to be in the Now, away from our normal patterns, and then get pulled out of it with every annoying ring tone?

Meh.
Maybe we'll need a new version of “Lamplighters” ….”CellJammers”

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.4355
spotman on September 12th, 2008 11:24 am

I agree with the above commenters. While I am a total geek, and LOVE the fact that you are able to take technology to a new level, and I LOVE the fact that you are using open source tools to do it – the one part I don't love, is the visual imagery I get when I imagine this project in its next phase…. There will no longer be “now” on the playa. There will no longer be the magic of what happens when you can't find your friends, that forces you to explore and meet your neighbors. I know that everyone in my camp, would be happy to spearhead a cell jammer project, but we don't want to have to.
edrabbit on September 12th, 2008 2:02 pm

I would hope that it would be more of a community standard that cell phones NOT be around and answered. While I have no desire to have any interaction with a cell phone, it's not my place to dictate how others spend their week on the playa. BRC is changing and growing, and different people are coming in and bringing a different feel to the event. I never would have guessed I'd wake up to beer bongs and frat-boy chants on Sunday morning last year. But, the OpenBTS team's goal is not “bring cell service to the playa” but rather to create an opensource cell solution that can be deployed elsewhere perhaps after a natural disaster or in a 3rd world country. I think the OpenBTS guys are aware of the Burner attitude as laid out these points on their site:

“If we did this again, and we well might, here's what we would do differently:
* Register as a theme camp so that people know about us and we have a predictable location.
* Fix our security holes, now that we understand them.
* Focus on SMS. Don't even provision most users for voice.
* Require users to disable audible ringtones and make a promise to take their calls out on the street as part of the provisioning process.
* If there's some real-world emergency, like a hurricane, allow users to make outgoing calls to the real world, but do not allow them to accept incoming calls. The gets rid of the problem of the ringing phone, but allows people to make important calls to their families. With Asterisk, we can even limit outgoing calls to specific area codes.”

That being said, personally I'd invest in a celljammer for our camp. :)
Griffin1 on September 12th, 2008 2:40 pm

NO!
This idea is a “BAD & SILLY “idea for the playa, for the future of Burningman to keep its integrity, its as simple as that…
Humanity over Technology is what gives the playa its tribal essence. This is the only place where this many people can get together and leave there baggage at the gate and truly open up, be reminded of life in the moment & imaginary awe!

~Just an example: Your watching the man burn or in the moment with a friend and a couple other people you havent met yet in the middle of nowhere at a wild art installation. While all of a sudden the phone rings next to you, someone next to you is now belligerently on the phone discribing the event out loud! ….SOme might call that a BUZZ KILL!!!!!
What's next~?
Mischief on September 13th, 2008 3:10 pm

You are lucky if you can get me to turn my phone back on a week after burning man—and I am a girl who is super addicted to texting! NO NO NO on the cell phone!
David A. Burgess on September 16th, 2008 3:19 am

I had this conversation in front of the Hookadome:

Q: Hey, is that a satellite phone?
A: No. Just an old Nokia.
Q: And you have coverage?
A: We brought our own cell.

Now that the dust has died down I'm going to toss in my $0.02 as one of guys who actually did this project and actually used a cellphone on the playa. I had a conversation about the social aspect of telephone service with the playa-phone guy before we even went to Burning Man. Since I'm one of those linear-thinking engineer-types, I'm just going to lay out some bullet points:

(*) Even if we wanted to (and we don't) we could not route incoming calls to people's phones without the cooperation of their cellular carriers. As an experimental system, that just wouldn't happen. So no one will be getting incoming calls from the real world though our system any time soon.

(*) Routing outgoing calls is easy, but hey, you don't HAVE to call out if you don't want. We didn't. We can even provision the system to disallow outgoing calls, but there are some circumstances where even the most dedicated burner might want to call home, like to see if Momma's been washed away yet (or crushed or burned if she lives in California). [Sure, it's a little irrational to want to know these things when you can't do anything about it, but people that's just how people are.]

(*) Our main interest is connecting calls locally on the playa, not to the real world. Backhaul is so limited that half the calls to the “real world” don't connect anyway.

(*) Call us silly, but we thought it was nice to be able to find campmates, especially in the middle of a dust storm.

(*) Typical calls were short and usually started with “Just where is this absinthe bar anyway?” and “You have to see this.” They usually ended with “See you in minute.”

(*) Even the ringing phone was less annoying than those goddamned FRS radios blurting out static and random crap every few seconds.

(*) We operate under a license from the FCC. Please don't jam us. It's not just rude; it's a violation of federal law.

(*) Problems with cellphones are caused by people, not by technology. If your phone takes you out of the “now” it is because you allow it to do so. I had a different attitude about everything at BRC, including the phone. For me, the phone didn't break the “now” but only expanded the “here”. That's probably because I limited my calls to my campmates on the playa. If someone starts calling the outside world in the middle of the burn, that person probably didn't belong at Burning Man in the first place. That's not the phone's fault and it's not our fault for allowing the phone to work. We could call home whenever we wanted, and so could our neighbors, but we all decided not to. It's not complicated.

(*) Our long-term goal is to provide a technology for low-cost cellular service in poor countries. Turning Burning Man into a chat-fest does not serve that goal. We have internalized that already, but Burning Man is a wonderful test site and we will probably test there again. It's a hell of a lot more fun that most desert test sites, too.

Flame away. I'm standing by.

– David
edrabbit on September 16th, 2008 3:48 am

Hi David,

Thanks for chiming in here with some new info. I agree that having a connection to the outside world can be nice at times. I still remember stumbling across a (working) payphone on the playa my first year and having that brief chance to make a connection to the outside world. I ended up calling my dad and thanking him for helping me get out to BM (or rather thanked his answering machine when he didn't answer in the middle of the night). It was a special moment for me in a number of ways.

As far as communicating between others on the playa, I once thought that it would be great to keep in touch with each other over radios and communicate back and forth. Very quickly it became more of a task, and not as much fun. I was much more interested into just “letting go” and letting the wind and dust take me wherever. Our camp still used radios when there was a project (2pir) out in the deep playa in 2006, as there was a functional need for them. “Send out a monkey wrench” or “We need water” was better than a long drive/bike/walk back to camp for something. I'm still not 100% sure on how I feel about cell phones between people on the playa and I guess I won't know until I encounter it myself. I am very happy to hear that incoming calls are limited as I would hate to suddenly get an unexpected call in the middle of the playa. I worry that like many things on the playa (megaphones, gas-powered scooters, etc) it will be a cool new thing, but when everyone is using them it starts getting more annoying than fun.

I've had many different project ideas for Burning Man that involve cross-playa communication as I think it is interesting how people interact at Burning Man. I'm curious to see what impact this has on things. I'm not completely sold on the idea, but I'm open to it and it definitely gets the geek in me excited.

I bet BM is a much more interesting test site, and if you guys are out there next year maybe I'll swing by and get setup to receive calls, and then post my number at center camp (or at the payphone if it's still around) and see what sort of random calls from random people bring about new adventures for me.
ToMmY on September 23rd, 2008 10:22 pm

I'm glad to see someone put Asterisk to a new use. More, it's only a matter of time until carriers hit Gerlach. There are already plans for 2009 by two carriers to put GSM there. Cell phones will be a reality, even if you have to stand on top of an RV to get a call. For those that need them, you won't have to rent a sat phone or try and voip it over the oversubscribed wifi that's generously connected back to Gerlach or private HughesNet antennas. Face it folks, some of us have to be contacted in an emergency.

There was also the fellow near 7:00 and C that had what he said was a direct GSM link with Winnemucca. The yagi antenna he had was pointed in the right direction. I made a live call.

Truly, I understand the feeling of being away from the “default world” but I also have need to ensure that my responsibilities, including a mother with dementia and an autistic brother are in good shape.

Cognitively, if you're a real burner and subscribe to being in charge of your self through radical self-reliance, you can turn off your freaking phone for the duration. Others that have responsibilities that don't stop the week before Labor Day, may need them. I, for one, think that SMS is a weak way out. Full GSM is going to be a reality perhaps by the next burn. For this long time burner, it's welcome. I know where the OFF switch is.
DH_Honey on June 4th, 2009 1:47 pm

How about getting ahead of the curve and researching a cell-phone ettiquette.
In my camp, every year, we struggle to make 1 call or email exchange midweek for someone to bring supplies.
We accept the struggle, and we haven't failed yet, like with everything else in BRC.
Guess we don't really need this!

I do get you ed! The geek in me totally lusts for it, though ;)
toddyG on August 31st, 2009 12:33 am

I think it's the most ridiculous thing that I have ever heard of in my entire life! and I thought by now, I had seen and heard it all. But, I'm here to tell you, if i see people walking through the city streets of BRC with their faces welded to some foreign appendage….1st I will become very verbal with my disgust and contempt, for it is my … Read Moreright as a citizen of BRC 12yrs to formally file a complaint to u directly (as soon as u get off the F-kn phone). 2) Mock and chastise you for isolating yourself from all and who surround you. Eliminating the experience of being in “this” moment (as soon as u get of the F-kn phone). 3) Hope, pray, and laugh when the water truck comes by and drenches you & ur hand held demonic device with water as u were too preoccupied to notice anything except being on the F-kn phone! 4) Initiate a city ban on any and all usage of cell phones outside of your camp. Any such behavior shall be dealt with censured and strict action ie fines, public stockades….
If “Johny Law” can come into our city and bust us for our “simple little pleasures… Read More” as we exclaim “I’m not hurting anyone”, then those self absorbed cell phone junkies who impale the rest of us with their verbal diarrhea pertaining to some trivial chit chat should be accountable & their actions, be deemed criminal. Physical assault on ones ears, causing stress and fatigue. Negligent imprudent noise pollution. Blatant and obtrusive disregard for the well being of their community. Brazen defiance for compassion while boastfully illustrating insensitive & obtuse demeanor. Flagrant public displays of incorrigible disdain. Flamboyant and vigorous outbursts of self righteousness behavior, commanding arrogance. (wait, scratch that, that last one IS permitted and encouraged through city ordinance) The thing that I have always loved about “The Man” is that “get away” feeling that is established w/out phones, pagers, fax machines, etc. ..
Listen, I know that the cell phone is a brilliant technologicl device. In fact probably an imperative tool in time of emergency or crisis. But really,,,, does the phrase “hey, what r u guys doing now?” resemble an emergency or crisis?

Can someone help me down from my soap box now? I need to mend this nerve that's been struck :)

Peace, have a great burn be safe!…

And if u see me somewhere bloody and run over in the middle of the playa, please call 911

Cheers
TG
joon on September 11th, 2009 10:48 pm

It would be nice to have the option to contact other burners without using smoke signals or telepathy.
Canvas Stretching Machine on March 19th, 2010 12:51 am

why, it scares me…
Canvas Stretching Machine on March 19th, 2010 7:51 am

why, it scares me…
Ssgoogoo121 on August 26th, 2010 3:48 am

I would only advise using a cell phone blocker in places where cellular telephone usage is highly annoying and socially unacceptable, i.e. a resturant, movie theatre, classroom, etc.
Otherwise, I think it would be best to leave people alone. However, in these situations, it is rather difficult to get caught or for the FCC to do anything about it. If you’re running it 24/7 out of your apartment and telling everyone about it, then you do deserve to get caught and it would be much easier to find the source of the interference to implicate you criminally.
Everyone loves to huff and puff indignatly on the Internet. The FCC can’t do anything more than try to question you (and you can refuse to talk to them) and try to take signal readings outside your residence.