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Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

vodafone.com

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Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#71

Post by mrbonner »

andrewstuart wrote: post #35

This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…

Why does it have to be Rpi for those kind of project, I am wondering? What stops me from buying a NIC or even a bare-board PC for the project?

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#72

Post by irjustin »

cushychicken wrote: post #38
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…

Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. Seems a bit harsh to blame them for selling their products to the customers who are most able to pay for them, which enables them to stay in business. (Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.)

> Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.

You're arguing for the parent comment with this.

The "foundation" was intentioned as for hobbyists and people who wanted to learn while being affordable that's how it was sold to the general public. Chasing a higher payer will always lock out "affordable".

An analogy would be healthcare. Capitalism and affordable+for-many are at direct odds.

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#73

Post by wmf »

Diapason wrote: post #61
eloy wrote: post #14

Funny how Vodafone manages to write an entire article about a femtocell they built without using that word a single time.

This. Also calling a piece of hardware a 'network' sounds weird to me.

In the telco world there is a distinction between cellular base stations that require an elaborate backend network and fairly new base stations that can work standalone because the "network" is built in.

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#76

Post by wmf »

Nextgrid wrote: post #43
borland wrote: post #10

Isn't this just "Now you can pay to purchase and operate hardware to compensate for our crappy coverage, so we don't have to improve it ourselves?"

My question would be why you'd ever use this instead of Wi-Fi? The range of these wouldn't be much better than a proper Wi-Fi access point anyway. Wi-Fi supports EAP-AKA which uses the SIM card and carrier's cooperation to seamlessly authenticate clients, so credential management is also solved.

For one thing they have access to spectrum that isn't already saturated.

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#77

Post by jareklupinski »

andrewstuart wrote: post #35

This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…

this makes me nervous to design anything substantial around an RP2040

with a Raspberry Pi at least you could port your application to any board that runs Linux just by moving the code over

but if your project depends on the PIO subsystem in any way, you're locked in to buying their chips forever; you can't just take your code to another platform

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#78

Post by hinkley »

monocasa wrote: post #62
meindnoch wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offloaded eBNF? You must be dealing with extremely large grammars if you need dedicated hardware to manage it :0

I think they mean a NIC that you can offload eBPF programs onto.

Exactly.

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#79

Post by hinkley »

Matsta wrote: post #37
hinkley wrote: post #4

If we could get an off the shelf SOC that's powerful enough to manage a PCIe daughter card, that would make me so happy. Software defined radio, offloaded eBPF, RAID controllers, are just the most obvious compute peripherals but there are a million others that could exist but don't. edit: acronym typo

Rock 5B [1] or any other board running on a RK33588 [1] https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock5/hardware/5b You have 4x lanes of Pcie 3.0 and the Rock 5b has 2.5gb Ethernet too. Software support isn't there yet but it's slowly getting better.

I would expect the internal bandwidth of a daughter card to need to be upward of 2x the PCIe lanes that it supports to the motherboard.

For instance a RAID card has to accept data from the motherboard and write it to the disks as fast as the disks allow.

We could do a PCIe card, but what I'm hoping for is to be able to dig ourselves out of the binary blob problem with have where Linux barely controls the actual hardware these days, and security concerns aren't something you can volunteer to fix. Our peripherals are pretending not to be computers but really they are and have been for some time.

If vendors aren't going to give us Open hardware, which it seems is never going to happen, then 'general purpose' expansion cards might be a forcing function.

Re: Vodafone unveils prototype 5G network built on a Raspberry Pi computer

#80

Post by mattmanser »

cushychicken wrote: post #38
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

This is the reason why you can't get a Raspberry Pi computer. Eben Upton, (Raspberry Pi Founder) sold out his his base. When the chip shortage hit, Upton made the decision to prioritise supply to industrial buyers over retail/hobbyists/education. His rationale was that companies that had bills to pay and salaries to pay should get priority because people's livelihoods depended on getting those Raspberry Pi's. Sounds…

Raspberry Pi is a corporate endeavor as well. They also have employees, and a payroll to maintain. Seems a bit harsh to blame them for selling their products to the customers who are most able to pay for them, which enables them to stay in business. (Whatever quantity Vodafone is buying is DEFINITELY more than any hobbyist is able to pay.)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17190918

You're very wrong, that was not what it was for.

Dr Upton says that will help the project grow much more quickly than previously thought.

"We didn't realise how successful this was going to be," he said.

"This means we can scale to volume. Now we can concentrate on teaching people to program."

What a lie that turned out to be!

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