This is a collection of tools used for adding interconnect and billing to VBTS. It's based on tools developed for the Papua VBTS network, a project of UC Berkeley TIER. You can read our paper about the network here.

This project includes:

• vbts-twilio: A (misnamed) implementation of interconnection that support send and receive of SMS through both Nexmo and Twilio.
• vbts-credit: A prepaid billing and credit transfer system.
• vbts-configs: Basic Freeswitch dialplan and chatplan that allow you to integrate with libvbts, vbts-twilio, and vbts-credit.

You should first go through the OpenBTS installation procedure, and set up Freeswitch too. Make sure you build and install mod_xml_cdr when you're setting up Freeswitch.

Set up the dependencies:

• Install the following Python packages using pip: snowflake, requests, webpy, smspdu, twilio, phonenumbers, flup.
• Instal pylibnexmo.
• Install lighttpd, and configure it to run on port 8081.

After that, just install vbts-credit and vbts-twilio as you normally do Python packages.

cd vbts-credit
python setup.py install
cd ../vbts-twilio
python setup.py install

You can then develop your own Freeswitch diaplan/chatplan based on the sample ones provided in vbts-configs.

There are a lot of potential hangups in all this: building your own mini-phone network isn't simple. We're working on making the process easier, so please let us know if you run into trouble.

• Kurtis Heimerl
• Shaddi Hasan