But now that T-Mobile is renegging their promise & not going to meet the minimum deployment size they promised, they have been saying the FCC should find a way to sell by area some of that spectrum sitting dormant in such a wide wide % of America (personally I think it makes their bid invalid & they should forefeit their bid for such egregious dirty lying). https://www.lightreading.com/5g/t-mobile-relinquishes-mmwave...
I think some of the analog tv spectrum has some precedent for being sold per-area rather than nation wide, but I'm not sure how that's been going.
In terms of hardware, there's some fascinating stuff. Facebook's SuperCell large-tower project showed awesome scale out possibility for large towers. Their Terragraph effort is spun out, and seems to have some solid customers using their hardware. Meta spun off their EvenStar 5G system, which has a strong presence at Open compute now. https://www.opencompute.org/projects/evenstar-open-radio-uni...
But it's hard to tell how acquireable such a thing really is. There's plenty of existing nodes out there too. It is unclear to me though how acquireable such things really are- there not being an open market, since there's no usable spectrum feels like a conundrum for the market, even though these are extremely high volume amazingly integrated advanced wireless systems that you'd think would be visibly prolific.
You can run 5G in the unlicensed spectrum. AWS can rent you hardware for it: https://aws.amazon.com/private5g/ - it's $5k a month per site. I know a plant that switched to that because they couldn't get WiFi to work reliably for them.
But even if you want to run within the licensed spectrum, local licenses for a couple of bands are cheap. I was involved in setting up a private network in the licensed spectrum around 10 years ago (based on https://aviatnetworks.com/ ), and a local site spectrum license was something ridiculously small (in the range of a hundred dollars).
It's expensive if you want to do it nation-wide.
What is definition of "Open" here?
The current submission is entirely about Open Source 4G/5G. Fabrice Bellard on top of the crazy amount of other stuff he did also made a LTE/NR Base Station Software [1]. WiFi and Bluetooth are also "Open".
>But the thing that's holding Apple up is purely legal IMO
People constantly mistaken having an open standard regardless of patents and an useable product on the market. There is no reason why you cant have a software modem aka Icera that was acquired by Nvidia in the early 10s. And there are no modem monopoly by Qualcomm which is common misconception across all the threads on HN and wider internet. MediaTek, Samsung, Huawei, Spreadtrum and a few others have been shipping 4G / 5G Modem on the market for years.
The only reason why Apple hasn't released a modem 6 years after they acquired the modem asset from Intel is because having a decent modem, performance / watt comparatively to what on market is Hard. Insanely hard. You have Telecoms from top 50 market each with slightly different hardware software spectrum combination and scenario along with different climate and terrains. It took Mediatek and Samsung years with lots of testing and real world usage at the lower end phone to gain valuable insight. Still not as good as Qualcomm but at least it gets to a point no one is complaining as much.
Patent unencumbered in a way that someone could make a commercially viable implementation as a "small or midsized" company, as the parent post asked. Open Source proves my point - the issue is not implementation (note - I'm not claiming implementation isn't hard, it is - I certainly know from personal experience that it is and I would never claim to be able to personally build an energy efficient 4G or 5G modem, but I don't think that raw engineering horsepower is what's holding Apple/Intel/NVidia back here).
> MediaTek, Samsung, Huawei, Spreadtrum and a few others have been shipping 4G / 5G Modem on the market for years.
The CCP effectively told Qualcomm to get lost in 2015 and Taiwan settled an antitrust agreement between them and MediaTek in 2018, so MediaTek, Huawei, and Unisoc/Spreadtrum are not good examples here. I believe the South Korean government also intervened on behalf of Samsung. Actually, the list of modem vendors you list pretty much matches exactly the list of governments who prosecuted, fined, and settled with Qualcomm for antitrust.
Doesn't this exclude all modern cellular standards then?
> The LTE/NR eNodeB/gNodeB software is commercialized by Amarisoft.
> A UE simulator is now available. It simulates hundreds of terminals sharing the same antenna. It uses the same hardware configuration as the LTE eNodeB.
> An embebbed NB-IoT modem based on Amarisoft UE software.
The main problem is the sheer age of mobile phone networks. A phone has to support everything from top-modern 5G down to 2G to be usable across the world, that's almost as much garbage that a baseband/modem FW/HW has to drag along as Intel has to with the x86 architecture.
And if that isn't complex enough, phones have to be able to deal with quirks of all kinds of misbehaving devices - RF is shared media after all, and there's devices not complying with the standard, the standards containing ambiguous or undefined behavior specs, completely third-party services blasting wholly incompatible signals around (e.g. DVB-T operates on frequencies in some countries that are used for phone service in other countries, and often on much much higher TX power than phone tower sites). If it can't handle that or, worse, disrupts other legitimate RF users, certification won't be possible.
But that experience in dealing with about 35 years worth of history is just one part of the secret sauce - that just makes the costs of entry for FOSS projects really huge (which is why all of these projects I'm aware of support only 4G and afterwards since that generation is the first one to throw away all the legacy garbage).
The other part of why there are so few vendors is patents, and there is a toooooon of patent holders for 5G [1], with the top holders being either Chinese or known for being excessively litigious (Qualcomm). And even assuming you manage to work out deals with all of the patent holders (because of course there is, to my knowledge at least, no "one stop shop" compared to say MPEG), you still have to get a design that fulfills your requirements for raw performance, can coexist peacefully with almost all other users of the RF spectrum to be power efficient at the same time. That is the main challenge for Apple IMHO - they have a lot of experience doing that with "classic" SoCs, but almost none for RF hardware, virtually all of that comes from external vendors.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1276457/leading-owners-o...
Is it intended for device vendors creating phones and tablets or for telecom companies building their own infrastructures?
Use cases are partly captured by the list of customers across the bottom of the srsRAN home page (https://www.srsran.com/). It's great for any company/research group smaller than a multinational base station manufacturer, at which size the big players don't want to talk to you.
- Testing of various kinds. You can get deep inside an OSS base station, inspect and debug things, but likely may not even look at the proprietary innards of a commercial BS.
- Emergency connectivity when the backbone is broken, or did not exist. Most people would bring mobile phones anyway.
- Study / teaching, like MINIX OS or trainer aircraft which you can take apart and inspect.
- Maybe very small local cells to improve connectivity in difficult landscapes (mountains, skyscrapers, underground).
I was wondering a bit whether that means Base Station or perhaps something else...
Something like this would've been useful in a couple remote networks that I worked on. Internet was easy to get with some ubiquiti wifi routers and antennae. Getting cell reception was a pain in the ass that involved setting up a repeater in the one spot of the valley where reception was kinda okay. I haven't looked into the project too much, but I imagine I could set it up to connect to a telcom tower and handle the wireless backhaul similarly to how I did the wifi.
Edit: An open implementation like this could lead to cheaper cells for large, concrete/metal buildings that typically have terrible reception.
This project tries to build an open solution following O-RAN standards for RAN software. It is targeting telecom. companies for their Radio Access Network (RAN). Their infrastructure is divided into the Core Network (like a simple internet network) and the Radio Access Network (base stations, antennas and all that stuff). Phones and tablets are User Equipment (UE), nothing to do with srsRAN.
Genuine question.
It looks so closed and complex compared to more traditional comms like wifi or even ethernet.
You could build srsRAN and run a local eNodeB instance to form a local LTE network. Given that it has a radio that operates in the LTE bands, in theory you might be able to build srsRAN for a phone and run the necessary base station software (eNodeB and EPC) on a phone to form an "ad hoc" network. It wouldn't be truly ad hoc in that the network would still have a base station, just that it would be running on phone hardware. srsRAN wouldn't be running as an application, but would be replacing the firmware in the phone's LTE modem.
Edit:
Here is a paper by someone who has built an ad hoc LTE network.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.09262
It does exactly the above: using srsRAN (which used to be called srsLTE) to run local base station software (eNodeB+EPC) to get around the asymmetry in the LTE protocol.
Because billing.
All the complexity in cellular can be traced back to making the system secure the whole way back to SIM cards because there is actual money at stake if the system gets cracked.
If you like, you can consider just plain old VOIP where the central entity is used for discovery but the actual call may then be routed p2p though not in VoLTE and its successors of course because the media plane is also centrally routed.
However, if I’m not mistaken 5G has V2V comms (Vehicle to Vehicle) specifically designed for self-driving cars, drones and IoT and that is the most “ad hoc” it can get
Networking between phones, without a common base station, is hard. Harder than WI-FI, because identity is managed centrally and the frecs in use require a license to name some "simple" problems. Cellular comms are not designed to handle this kind of scenario.
There has been some work to add inter device connectivity lately, to support many interesting use cases. You can find more looking for "sidelink" or "PC5", but you will not find many phones that implement it.
It seems to be mostly focused in vehicular use cases in V2V and V2X scenarios
5G also has a peer mode, and I'm trying to figure out if it can be implemented in userspace or has to be done in firmware.
My idea is that peer mode would be useful for replacing walkie-talkie or mesh messaging like Meshtastic since everyone has a phone. The range is supposed to be around a mile.
Proprietary, Closed Standards: no
Here are all the 3GPP 4G/5G standards that govern cellular phone networks:
https://www.3gpp.org/specifications-technologies
Also look under the "Specifications" drop down menu at the top of the page. Every release is listed.
These standards being freely available is why SRS were able to write srsRAN. There is nothing stopping others from doing so either, apart from the amount of information that has to be understood and digested.
Edit: Apart from complexity the other potential barrier is patents, but that's not a technical barrier.
Those technologies aren't terribly useful to use in your house like WiFi is, and even if they were, you need more government paperwork to do it. That means less hobbyist interest.
It is better than NDA with Broadcom, but still...
The LA9310 has incredible specs, too, what a beast.
Have you done anything with its Network Listening feature? I'm curious if that's frequency flexible or if it's limited to a specific handful of common bands.
How have you found the NXP SDK, is it reasonably decent to work with?
Then you'll just need a decent SDR and it actually works fairly well for small test setups.
Phones are nitpicky about network configuration (chippers, emergency calling and so on). I would recommend starting with a USB modem. Also setting your network PLMN to the 00101 (the testing one), as it usually gets preferencial treatment in UEs.
LTE didn't allow for it to be used as primary carrier, but NR-SA I think does.
[1] https://www.quantulum.co.uk/blog/private-lte-with-limesdr-an...
[2] https://www.quantulum.co.uk/blog/private-lte-with-limesdr-an...
Their code base is so much nicer than other projects, and somewhat easy to match with the standards. I am very happy user :)
My personal tinfoil hat says the corporations started the 5G cancer rumors themselves to distract the public from the real terror of 5G that is ORan data sharing.
The tl;dr is any participant in Oran can put software directly on the antena and access your data directly with no need for it to go through a 3rd party like your cell provider. The cell providers charge for access to the antenna. This sidestep any potentially conflict with selling your data - by choosing a 5g cell phone, you have already opted in to your data being accessed. Creepy.