Telecommunications plays a critical enabling role in disaster response, both for the local population and for responses of external origin. However, it is common for telecommunications capacity to be reduced or disabled by the disaster or emergency. Meanwhile, the disaster stimulates demand for any remaining capacity, often resulting in total loss of telecommunications capability during the acute phase of a disaster and its response.

The Serval Project is addressing this through the implementation of a mesh mobile telephony system that is compatible with some existing mobile telephone handsets, and can be integrated into many more models without changing handset hardware designs or cost. This technology allows mobile telephones to directly communicate with one another, and allows telephone calls to be made without infrastructure beyond the telephones themselves. Our Distributed Numbering Architecture allows the telephones to use their existing telephone numbers, so that communications can continue immediately and without impediment when needed. The telephones self-organise, and relay calls for distant telephones, thus forming their own resilient telecommunications infrastructure that is able to remain operative during all phases of a disaster and its response, thus addressing an important vulnerability of the existing infrastructure-oriented approach to telecommunications. We see applications that include supporting communities in maintaining communication in order that medical and public health effects of emergencies can be responded to more effectively and potentially providing ready access to communications for distributed teams of emergency health and humanitarian workers in disasters. Our goal in creating this technology and removing all barriers to adoption is to facilitate its ubiquitous inclusion in new mobile telephones, so that we can leverage the mass production of consumer electronics to create a resilient telecommunications capacity that can be deployed anywhere without supporting infrastructure. This would enable the creation of, for example, networks consisting solely of used telephones.