villageTelco

VILLAGE TELCO
website and blog by David Rowe http://www.villagetelco.org/ ... an initiative to assemble/develop the cheapest, easiest to setup, easiest to manage, scalable, Open Source, standards-based, wireless local do-it-yourself telephone company toolkit in the world


 * DSP** = Digital Signal Processing (http://www.dsptutor.freeuk.com/intro.htm)

A digital signal consists of a stream of numbers, usually (but not necessarily) in binary form. The processing of a digital signal is done by performing numerical calculations ...

In many cases, the signal of interest is initially in the form of an analog electrical voltage or current, produced for example by a microphone or some other type of transducer. In some situations, such as the output from the readout system of a CD (compact disc) player, the data is already in digital form. An analog signal must be converted into digital form before DSP techniques can be applied. An analog electrical voltage signal, for example, can be digitised using an electronic circuit called an analog-to-digital converter or ADC. This generates a digital output as a stream of binary numbers whose values represent the electrical voltage input to the device at each sampling instant

DSP technology is nowadays commonplace in such devices as mobile phones, multimedia computers, video recorders, CD players, hard disc drive controllers and modems, and will soon replace analog circuitry in TV sets and telephones. An important application of DSP is in signal compression and decompression. Signal compression is used in digital cellular phones to allow a greater number of calls to be handled simultaneously within each local "cell". DSP signal compression technology allows people not only to talk to one another but also to see one another on their computer screens, using small video cameras mounted on the computer monitors, with only a conventional telephone line linking them together. In audio CD systems, DSP technology is used to perform complex error detection and correction on the raw data as it is read from the CD....


 * Mesh Potato** is the name of a piece of wireless telephony hardware and software that doesn’t exist yet. It is a marriage of a low-cost wireless access point (AP) capable of running a mesh networking protocol and an Analog Telephony Adapter or ATA. The name Mesh Potato came from combining Mesh with POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) and ATA