SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
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SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
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Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#2Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#3Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
What do you mean by implementing? Make your own radio chips, designed from the ground up? Or merely producing a networking device using chips from suppliers like Intel, TI, Broadcom, Qualcomm etc? Or the software side only?
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#4Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
The availability of hardware seems semi moot, since afaik there's basically no way to get spectrum short of big national auctions.
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.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#5Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee has bunch of public specifications and knowledge about it to make it feasible. AFAIK, the specifications for 4G/5G is publicly available but extremely complex + you'd need licensing agreements, pay royalties, etc. So unless this imaginary company of yours have specialized expertise in all that, it seems unlikely to be feasible.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#6Official srsRAN project website:
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#7Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
Stuff for GSM/CDMA has been around for years, OpenBTS is the primary example. This is the first I've heard of anything more modern/complicated being implemented. From my understanding, a lot of the hard eng work is in the RF frontend and making it small/low power enough to fit in a phone for example. OpenBTS got around this by using existing SRDs for their RF frontend.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#8Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
The big problem is patents and copyright. No common wireless standards are open. No wireless standards are feasible to implement. Seriously. It's that bad. Certainly a modern 4G/5G standard is complex from a hardware standpoint to implement - the way you usually do these is using a very powerful embedded DSP, which is also not open (Qualcomm Hexagon is the most reverse-engineered of these if you want to understand what's going on). But the thing that's holding Apple up is purely legal IMO.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#9Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
The availability of hardware seems semi moot, since afaik there's basically no way to get spectrum short of big national auctions. 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 inv…
> The availability of hardware seems semi moot, since afaik there's basically no way to get spectrum short of big national auctions.
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.
Re: SrsRAN: Open-Source 4G/5G
#10Could anyone more knowledgeable on the topic explain to what extent common wireless connectivity standards are open and feasible to implement for, say, a medium sized company? Apple has been working on a 5G modem for what feels like a billion years, but other standards seem to be more democratized.
Fabrice Bellard open sourced a 4G (LTE) base station.