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

I do get you ed! The geek in me totally lusts for it, though ;)

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.

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.

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

~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~?

“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. :)