The Antarctic is a battleground between many countries which stake a claim to its natural resources, but at least several of those governments are now investing in communications for the icy region. This week, two separate initiatives, backed by Australia and Uruguay respectively, were announced to extend cellular connectivity to people working in Antarctica.
The Australian project has resulted in a self-contained GSM network being deployed on Macquarie Island, which is about halfway between the two territories, with plans to extend it to three research stations on the Antarctic mainland. The roll-out makes previous Australian deployments in climatically hostile environments, like its outback, look simple.
The country’s Department of the Environment is using equipment from Range Networks, which has the unusual business model of providing an open source base station platform, OpenBTS. This uses software defined radios to create the air interface link, and all the other base station and mobile core functions run in software on a commodity server or in the cloud.
Given the flexibility and low cost of this approach, it has been particularly focused on remote areas of the world where conventional systems have not been implemented ‘ it has installations in ultra-rural Indonesian and Zambian areas, for instance. Like other companies specializing in remote or emergency connectivity, such as Bose, Range provides a ‘network in a box’, though this is just the commercial manifestation of its platform. It hopes such showcase roll-outs will drive adoption of OpenBTS by partners with greater scale, attracted by the cost effectiveness of open source and the potential of a software-only platform to play a role in the rising trend towards mobile network virtualization.
Range’s system is not quite the first GSM in the Antarctic. In fact, the first country to bring cellular connections to its researchers and explorers in Antarctica was Argentina. Two operators, America Movil (Claro) and Telefonica Movistar, extended their networks to parts of the Antarctic, using satellite backhaul. But these systems were not self-contained and still relied on the mobile core back home.
By contrast, Range’s network manages and switches calls locally, and so the system would keep working within its coverage area if the satellite backhaul ‘ still needed to link to the rest of the world of course ‘ went down. The Australian government is even running its landline VoIP system on the same equipment, with cellphones acting as extensions to that generic IP network. Range will also build a network on a 110-man research vessel, extending the network out to the open ocean.
Meanwhile, in another part of the Antarctic, workers on Uruguay’s Artigas Base research station now have mobile telephony courtesy of a government-backed project involving local cellco Antel, and Ericsson. Antel’s network now reaches the Artigas Base, in the South Shetlands region of Antarctica, using a highly ruggedized RBS 6102 base station with satellite backhaul. The base is over 1,000 kilometers from the nearest point in South America.