The NapoNet project continues. Kyle Elliott and Ed King, undergraduates at CU, and Matt Hulse, now a graduate student at CU, traveled to the Napo on June 2nd. The goals of the trip were to check up on the network and perform whatever maintenance was needed, install a new node in the village of Campo Serio, and perform qualitative interviews with users of the network.
Here are a few pictures pending further updates:
 Telecommunication equipment at the top of the tower. |
There is quite a lot of hardware out there for physical handsets. This post assumes we’re going with a physical handset as our on-site device. As alternatives to handsets, there are many free softphone applications (VoIP-app that runs on a computer) if there are PC workstations to piggyback off of for no additional cost. I believe we still need to come up with a performance specification for exactly how many handsets we’d want at each site and why. But here’s a summary of some initial digging:
There is a huge list available from VoIP-Info.org located here. I’m working my way through a thorough follow-up of every link (finding some dead ones too) to get a full list of budget phones. In terms of capability, I want to highlight the following feature v. cost comparisons:
Overall, it looks like the “budget” price spectrum for IP phone handsets is between $30-$70 per unit. I’ll continue to work on preparing a list of specific models we should consider for our application. Best;
Matt.
NapoNet – July-2010 Travel Report – Tele Education in the Amazon Region of Peru
NapoNet – Dec-2009_Jan-2010 Travel Report – Tele Education in the Amazon Region of Peru
NapoNet – February-2009 Travel Report – Tele-Education in the Amazon Region of Peru – 2nd Phase
NapoNet – July-2009 Travel Report – Tele-Education in the Amazon Region of Peru – 2nd Phase UPDATED
NapoNet -Final Travel Report – Tele-Education in the Amazon Region of Peru – 2nd Phase – Summer 2009
NapoNet – ICTD and Information Needs Assessment – Summer 2009
NapoNet Tentative Projects Ideas
Hi all-
Regarding Netbooks:
Cheapest I could find is something like this: Acer Aspire ONE D250-1165 – Atom N270 1.6 GHz – 10.1″ TFT
another useful review site: http://computers.toptenreviews.com/netbooks/
Also, looks like ubuntu and asterisk (or asteriskNOW) will probably be our platform: http://www.asterisknow.org/. Kevin will probably have more on this at the meeting.
There was some discussion at the last meeting about having a computer at each node, but after talking it over with my roommate (big networking guy..) we really only need 1 computer, for the server. All traffic can be monitored (or even capped) with one computer, and that could save us money. That one computer could even act as a router, if need be.
Depending on how we are going to use the existing backbone, we might not need much hardware. This has been explained to me once, and I’m not sure I completely understand it, so I’m hoping Matt (my roommate) can come to our next meeting, but:
Will we have our own, private network? or can we use the existing routers to route calls to our phones? If we want to keep the med and educ networks completely independent (192.xxx.xxx.xxx = med, 193.xxx.xxx.xxx = health), we’ll need our own routers, but if we can modify the existing routers to direct calls to either the health setup (if 192.168.1.1 is called, for example) or our IP phone (192.168.1.2, for example), then we don’t need additional routers..
just wanted to get ideas down here. we can talk more at the next meeting.
-devin
[Devin: You might know this already, but to make links with descriptive anchor text you can click on the button with the chain on it. - Brian]
