The drive from Oaxaca City to Villa Talea de Castro takes about three hours. But that’s only with a good vehicle and if it’s not rain season. Even when the weather is good, the two-lane, two-way road can be full of surprises like mudslides, potholes and only one bathroom for the last 150 km of the journey.
Every hour or so, there is a satellite TV dish, usually where there is a small cluster of houses. At other points, antennas dot the hills in the distance. But the signs of connectivity are misleading. Villa Talea de Castro, as well as most of the hundreds of indigenous communities that live in the Sierra Juárez of Mexico, may have dozens of TV channels but no phone service.
According to a Mexican NGO, as of 2006, 60 per cent of indigenous communities in Mexico did not have access to cellphone networks or any type of telephone services.
Last year, community members of Villa Talea de Castro finally decided to do something about this. After being ignored by cellphone service providers for years, the village chose to fix the problem themselves and build the first community-owned and operated cellphone network in the country. The best part being that they could chose what to charge.
Access to technology is commonly tied to social class or geographical location. After the Internet and the cellphone became commodities that most people take for granted, development agencies were fast to suggest that access to technology would improve the economy.
But NGOs and government agencies in charge of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) projects often ignored the real needs of communities that were deemed as being “underdeveloped.” In fact, these projects seldom sought out participation from community members, and in some cases even posed a threat to the preservation of their culture.
Villa Talea de Castro seen from uphill.
Villa Talea de Castro is in the northern part of the Sierra Juarez, home to hundreds of small, isolated communities. A vast majority are Zapotecos or Mixtecos, two of the many indigenous cultures that still exist in Mexico and Oaxaca.
It is also one of the most fertile parts of the country. It rains a lot and it’s home to many microclimates, so people can grow pine trees and banana trees on the same hill. Villa Talea de Castro is 1,600 meters above sea level, on the side of one of the hills where coffee, bananas and oranges are grown.
Like many of the communities in the area, the 2,500 people who live here produce their own food and protect their forests from private loggers. All logging is sustainable and done by the village.
Most of these towns maintain a form of local autonomy. It means that, in many aspects, they can do whatever they want, which, so far at least, includes creating and operating their own cellphone network.
How is this done? The only way to connect such a remote area is through a really robust Internet connection.
“About three billion people use a GSM network worldwide, but very few people know how it actually works,” explains Peter Bloom. Bloom is the head of Rhizomantica, the non-profit organization responsible for starting this project.
The technology that is being used was discovered by accident. The people behind it were trying to understand how GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) –the first cellphone operating system to use a chip – works and ended up designing software capable of creating individual networks. This software, now known as OpenBSC, is public.
The equipment being used in Villa Talea de Castro allows operators to run a GSM cellphone network through a minimal amount of equipment that allows users to build a small, self-contained network that uses radio frequencies.
Calls going out of the village are routed through a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) – similar to what Skype uses – that is also used to connect calls made into the village. All that is required is the transmitter, antennas, network cables, computers and plenty of bandwidth.
“Usually in the telecommunication industry you’re talking about incredibly expensive proprietary equipment that a normal person just doesn’t have access to,” says Bloom. This is not the case here. Although some hardware is needed, Bloom says the system could be set up by anyone who knows how to use Linux.
About a year ago, a California-based company called Range Networks donated equipment used in Villa Talea de Castro. The community later purchased different equipment through a loan that the town’s credit union gave to the local government. It cost approximately $25,000 USD. Technically, every member of the community owns the equipment.
In March 2013, the villagers finally could use their cellphones. The charge to use the service was originally 15 pesos a month. That’s a little more than a dollar. The cost recently doubled to 30 pesos. But it is still 13 times lower than the prices charged by commercial mobile operators in Mexico.
A bargain for the residents of Villa Talea de Castro; that is, until the network stopped working a couple of months ago.
A new system
Giovanni Civardi, also known as Ciaby, is sweating. He is carrying a ladder up the hill to the tower where all the telecoms equipment is. The village is on the side of a mountain, so almost everywhere is either uphill or downhill.
“When will we have service again?” ask passers-by.
The community has been without coverage for over a month and things are especially tense since this weekend is the town’s big party. Music and marching bands from all over the country will be arriving soon, a bunch of mechanical games are already being set up, and the town’s speakers are blaring with music and announcements related to the festival.
Ciaby is working with Bloom to put in a new transmitter. The duo met at a hacker’s conference a few months back. The Italian programmer was planning a trip through Latin America. He never made it past Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca because Bloom offered him a job. He has been living in Oaxaca City ever since.
Since many companies don’t ship to Mexico, an issue Bloom (pictured on the right) and Ciaby have been faced with is getting their hands on the right equipment.
Up in the tower where the equipment is kept, Ciaby is reinstalling everything. Not only is the transmitter being changed, new antennas are going up. Fireworks can be heard in the distance as Bloom goes up the tower in a harness hoping no one is aiming at the “gringo.”
Bloom has been working with indigenous communities in Oaxaca for years. His involvement began when he started working to improve indigenous radio stations. For the last couple of years he has focused on the creation of community owned cellphone networks.
The idea came to him about three years ago. Back then he was working on a community video project in Nigeria, where they were trying to figure out how to get cameras to people.
“I realized everyone had cellphones with cameras on them,” says Bloom. “People already have phones. That’s one thing that we looked at, there’s one billion computers on earth, but there are seven billion cellphones.”
In Villa Talea de Castro over half the population already owned a cellphone. They just couldn’t call anyone. But Bloom hopes the new equipment will do the trick.
Once the system is up and running again, people will get new phone numbers. The plan is to use postal codes as prefixes to the five digits that are currently being distributed to users.
Since the network doesn’t have access to pre-established area codes, when a call is made from inside the same community, people just need to dial the five digits. When a call is made to a different community, the postal code becomes the prefix.
The idea was proposed by a group of hackers from Spain that call themselves the Phone Liberation Network. It also works if the network manages to expand to more than the two communities that are participating so far.
The sun is setting when the transmitter is finally set and all the cables are in place. All Ciaby needs to do is run the program on his computer. Since the network is online, he can do this from his laptop virtually anywhere.
“When the system is up, the green light should light up,” says Ciaby. It’s been a long day and he’s looking forward to a hot meal and some mezcal. Unfortunately, nothing happens, so he starts typing away on his computer.
“Here we go! Yeah, there’s something,” says Bloom, hovering over the computer. Apparently Ciaby had the power frequency set to low because he was experimenting with it in his apartment.
“We’ll see how well it works, we just have to make up a lot of stuff as we go along,” says Bloom.
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