Live data from Hacker News

A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

bellard.org

11–20 of 134 posts

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#11
post #5

Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).

Is there a reason that this Low-Cost software defined radio wouldn't work ($30)? http://www.amazon.com/Newsky-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-Defi...

receiver only?

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#12

I wonder why this was not developed/contributed to the GNU Radio toolkit ( http://gnuradio.org/redmine/projects/gnuradio/wiki ) .

Because it's Fabrice Bellard. Look at his ouerve, he doesn't bother integrating any of his projects into anything else, or put more charitably, dance to the politics of other peoples' projects. I don't blame him. Contributing to GNU projects as an outsider is a PITA.

It's more than that, I think: I've worked with people of his caliber in other fields, and I can appreciate that they need to work at their own pace.

e.g., if he submitted QEMU as a patch for bochs, and it was rejected (for whatever reason), does anyone think his time was better spent fixing that patch?

He produces ingenious, high quality code, and does so at an unbelievable rate (note, none of his open source projects is related to his day job as far as I can tell - except perhaps the ASN 1 compiler).

I think he is arguably optimizing his contribution to society, and I hope he keeps doing that. Let people who can't produce the core do all the integration/politics/detail stuff.

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#13
post #5

Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).

Is there a reason that this Low-Cost software defined radio wouldn't work ($30)? http://www.amazon.com/Newsky-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-Defi...

It's only a receiver. You'll need a transmit capable radio to do everything this does.

Re: A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

#18
post #8

Very neat. Shame that 'interested companies can contact me'. Would be fun to know how such base-stations - when attached to antenna - can be used to spoof things and perform attacks. Lets hope that comes up at some blackhat conference soon...

Fabrice has contributed to opensource more than almost anybody here. Absolutely no shame if he prefer to keep the source closed this time.

I think perhaps you've missed the point of free and open source software.
Post reply on HN