When he started getting complaints from relatives back home in Puerto Rico about the lack of reliable phone or Internet service in the mountainous center of the island, Jose Soto took things into his own hands and built his own wireless service—with a little help from his cousins. And with a little elbow grease, a few dollars, and a willing broadband provider, you could do the same.

In the mountainous center of Puerto Rico, many cell phone users need to travel 30 to 40 minutes from home to get a reliable cell phone connection, Soto said. And fewer than 25 percent of people in the region have access to the Internet, despite government programs to subsidize networks. That absence of service is largely because of the topography of the area—it’s impractical and too expensive to run cables through the mountains and valleys. Soto is now six months into an effort to change that by creating a wireless ISP and Voice over IP service, with a little help from friends and family.

Soto’s startup, Coquitel, is on the verge of providing Internet and telephone service to ten municipalities, colloquially called “pueblos," in inner Puerto Rico, with a potential customer base of 150,000 people. And he’s ready to go live with the full service as soon as the fiber-optic line he’s paying for out-of-pocket gets hooked up to his wireless mesh network, built with open source software and inexpensive hardware designed by Village Telco, a nonprofit organization in South Africa.

The mesh network will use unlicensed spectrum and is based on Village Telco’s “Mesh Potato," a weatherproof 802.11g wireless access and VoIP connection point that is designed to work well with relatively little or unstable power. In fact, it runs on about three watts—meaning it can be powered by solar or battery power, Power over Ethernet (PoE), or Power over Telephone Line (PoTL). Costing about $80 per unit, the Mesh Potato—manufactured by the Chinese VoIP hardware company ATCOM—is intended to be mounted outdoors, on a pole or the roof of a house. Users can connect to it with a standard ATA telephone connection or over WiFi.

The Mesh Potato is, Soto says, extremely easy to set up. It is configured with a Web-based interface, or by punching in configuration codes from a connected handset. That interface handles all the configuration of the underlying software in the system, which includes the open-source VoIP PBX software Asterisk. Soto has already set up mesh networks in two communities, totaling 80 users, providing them with local calling. Each connected household gets an extension on a private phone network, as well as wireless data service. Once Coquitel has a connection to the Internet, it can be connected to a VoIP provider without requiring the company to acquire additional licensing.

Boldly going where no network has gone before

Coquitel is just the latest adopter of the Village Telco model, which was originally developed to give communities in Africa a self-contained telephone network. Steve Song, the founder of Village Telco, said that the Mesh Potato, which has been deployed so far mostly in small communities with under 100 customers, “has proved to survive anything short of a direct lightning strike."

"You can plug 240V into the Ethernet port and the MP will just reset and keep going," he says. "It is also very flexible, and can accept [any] input between 10 and 40V DC—which means it can be powered by a car battery or other alternative sources.”

In terms of the range of the network, however, Song said, “the Mesh Potato is quite ordinary.” Because it’s designed to create a mesh network, linking with multiple other access points, it uses an omnidirectional antenna with a maximum power of 20 dBm (100mW), so it can operate within most countries’ wireless regulations. That means that it works well in clusters—but requires a longer-haul network to connect between communities.

Coquitel’s initial customers are already using the network to make calls to one another. With volunteers, including some of Soto’s cousins, helping to get the word out about the potential service he’s aiming to provide through the Mesh Potatoes, he expects to have between 500 and 600 customers ready to sign up within the first month or so—once he has a stable backbone connection to the public switched telephone network and the Internet. So far, that has been his biggest challenge.

Soto, who has had experience in the cellular phone industry in the US and splits his time between Puerto Rico and Florida, said he was first looking to use a wireless network provider’s microwave connections for his network’s “backhaul,” but found the microwave often drops because of weather—heavy rains cause frequent “rain fade” for wireless links and satellite. Soto told Ars he is now partnering with “one of the major cable companies” to get a direct fiber-optic connection. He's also building his own wireless backhaul networks to connect the pueblos, using 5GHz wireless bridges, and is planning on obtaining licenses for other local spectrum to increase the capacity of his network as he adds more communities. Solo may ultimately use discarded satellite television service dishes to add directional antenna capabilities to Mesh Potato so that additional households can be connected over longer distances and through heavy vegetation.

The next generation of the Mesh Potato, Song says, will be faster, more capable, and less expensive. “We're working on a second–generation Mesh Potato based on an Atheros 802.11n SoC chip that should about halve our manufacturing costs while giving us the benefit of 802.11n performance," he told Ars. "It will also have an internal USB plug to which users can add a 3G dongle for redundancy or more RAM for running more sophisticated applications or anything USB-related that the user can think of. We also plan to make it easy to connect other devices like an Arduino so that people can design networks that can do more than just voice and data.”

Eventually, when his fiber is in place, Soto says he plans to offer Internet and long-distance calls for $29 a month (with cellular-style caps on data use). The project has gotten attention from local and territorial government officials—including public safety officials, who see the new network as a big gain in an area where there’s very little reliable wireless service, and as a potential back-up 911 system. And Soto says Coquitel is part of the Puerto Rico Bridge Initiative—an effort to improve broadband service and create Internet-based jobs in Puerto Rico.