Hacker News

Introduction to open source private LTE and 5G networks

• 123 Comments
• I'd love to setup a small scale network for personal use, but the elephant in the room is licensing.... Is it actually possible to formally license a DIY LTE network? (Or AMPS, 2G, 3G). In the UK, for example it is possible to get experimental licenses in principle, but I doubt it would be possible for an individual to legally operate a permanent or long term network on/near commercially allocated frequencies?

  By pomatic 3 years ago

• In the UK there are 2 ways to get access to long-term spectrum. It's also usable from a bands and handets perspective!
  1. Shared access licence. There's 3.3 MHz (duplex paired) of former DECT guardband available for local use at the top of the 1800 MHz band. This should work fine to run 2G or 4G. There's 10 MHz of TDD at 2390 to 2400 MHz, indoor use only I believe, and most useful for 4G. There's also 3.8 to 4.2 GHz which allows outdoor use, and is dedicated shared spectrum for 5G. Transmit power limited aren't enough to run a big commercial network, but are enough to deploy a private network on a campus or private site.
  The former two should be widely supported on handsets. The latter (5G option) is aligned with band N77.
  2. If you're in a rural area, get a local access licence to "take" existing operator spectrum and use it legally, with 3 years max tenure. It can be renewed if the operator has no intention to use it. Operators don't like this, as they see spectrum as their owned property, but this isn't the case, and they only have a right to use it...
  The process of getting a local access licence is deliberately complicated by operators as they don't want you doing it, but it can be done. You need to understand the technology and commercials of the industry though to realistically be successful. Some operators want you to talk to them first, others want you to talk to Ofcom first. If you know what you're doing, and make a strategically selected request for spectrum, it can be done. You can operate a commercial service in this spectrum, but you have to be clear to users the time-limited nature of spectrum access.
  Going forward though, it's clear from Ofcom's own priorities that a more dynamic nature of spectrum allocation and utilisation authorisation is a priority and likely to be coming down the line - it's been a work item the last couple of years. Once that comes, we could see easier ways to access spectrum. Realistically though, operators will do what they can to make spectrum access complex, to preserve a final moat in a market of 10+ years of continued reduction in average revenue per user.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• What would be the cost of this though? I thought these things tend to get bid up to the range of billions of dollars

  By ackbar03 3 years ago

• These licenses are in set-aside bands specifically for sharing. You're talking about 80 GBP per year for up to 10 MHz, and 80 GBP per year for each additional 10 MHz.
  https://www.ofcom.org.uk/manage-your-licence/radiocommunicat...
  This isn't nationally auctioned spectrum (which gets bid up to billions, then operators have to pay those fees into government coffers).

  By g_p 3 years ago

• Whoa!!!! That is not expensive! I did not know that

  By ackbar03 3 years ago

• I recently deployed an LTE network at a research station in Greenland. Licensing ended up much easier than I expected (the Greenlandic government almost immediately granted the license for LTE band 8), but this is in a place in the middle of the ice sheet hundreds of miles from the nearest village.

  By cozzyd 3 years ago

• I’d love to hear more about this, if you can share.
  How complex / large is it of an installation? How comparable (or not at all) to setting up a large scale wifi network? How complex is the maintenance? Team size for installing / operating vs number of people served?
  Everyone’s phone has a custom sim card?
  Thanks :) Truly curious about this.

  By gregsadetsky 3 years ago

• Just one eNodeB (the "Radio Access Network," i.e. part that connects to the antennas, sourced from Star Solutions), two antennas (13 dBi sectorial antennas with spatial diversity), and an EPC (the "backend," also from Star Solutions) as a VM on a single server. The goal is serve a detector array of 35 indepedent detectors up to 10 km away from the base station (which is mounted on the roof of the tallest building in the research station, some pictures of both a station and the base station that I happened to have taken are available here: https://www.desy.de/news/news_search/index_eng.html?openDire... ). Each station has an omni 8 dBi LTE antenna mounted at several meters height. I also did put a sim card in my phone and it worked fine though that was not the primary purpose (but it allowed me to video call from the middle of the ice sheet far away from the station WiFi, which was kind of a novelty).
  The only feasible alternative was 900 MHz WiFi which would have been similar, but lower throughput and much less available technology, whereas LTE modems are cheap and abundant.
  It was deployed about a month ago and so far so good. It's data only, and the server the EPC is on just acts as a gateway.
  Due to the conditions, the eNB is indoors. Installation of antennas was done by station carpenters as I was not allowed on the roof without training :). I am a physicist, not a telecom engineer but it was not too complicated.

  By cozzyd 3 years ago

• Really fascinating. Thanks a lot for this description!

  By gregsadetsky 3 years ago

• Not OP you replied to, but have done similar before. Answering your questions in order (at least the ones not specific to that scenario) to share some thoughts, which are certainly not answers by any stretch:
  - setting up a mobile network is quite different to a WiFi network in some ways, but perhaps a little more in line with a complex large-scale WiFi network. Mobile networks are architected around a "core network" which manages mobility and user traffic, and a "radio access network" which connects the base stations to your core network. The "core" is a fair bit more involved than a large-scale WiFi network setup, at least in my experience. You will need domain knowledge of 3GPP networks, and that's sometimes hard to get hold of, at least outside of traditional mobile operators and vendors. That can be a barrier.
  - In terms of maintenance, a well-built RAN should "run itself" for the most-part. You'll want some monitoring on equipment. If you are using modern software-based base stations, they will run on Linux. Treat this like any large at-scale fleet deployment of Linux servers. Keep them patched and plan your maintenance windows for reboots etc. Your core network itself will realistically be a bunch of Linux servers to provide network functions. You'll have the usual periodic maintenance issues keeping up a bunch of complex services that you don't always fully understand, and the temptation to never update anything, as "it's working right now".
  - The number of people you need for installing depends on skill sets. You'll need some experienced riggers to install macro sites on masts by climbing the masts. But you also need people who can pour concrete to get masts into the ground. And people who can install masts. You'll need someone who knows some DC electricals and can get everything powered up. You'll need some radio knowledge to plan out the network and check the antennas are pointed in the right directions and with the correct tilts. If you outsource this to a subcontractor, they can probably get the same people who do commercial networks to do it, but that will cost you dearly, and you'll never quite know what happened or how to fix it if something goes wrong!
  - To operate the network I guess it's not a huge amount different to any other complex IT system. If you build out your core network well, you can serve a few thousand users without too much trouble, with minimal people. Once you start to scale beyond a few thousand users, you have to scale up the core and architect it a bit better. There's some routine monitoring and maintenance, and the usual things you need to do in any production environment, but in general it's not too horrendous. If you go down the "big vendor box" route like carriers do, they'll take big complex managed services to keep everything in check, but have far fewer really good network people on-staff. The biggest issue you'll have in terms of staffing up to manage it is getting the breadth of knowledge and skills needed to have access to the right range of skills as needed - legacy telecoms can get complex fast. If you are having an issue with IMS for 4G calling (VoLTE), you might only need 1 person, but that's in addition to the 1 3GPP core expert you have, the 1 IP networking expert you have, etc.
  - You need to put a custom SIM into every device, and set up a PLMN identity for the network, which is just a 5 or 6 digit number that identifies the network to handsets. The SIM tells the phone what network it should try to join, and contains the crypto keys used to do authentication with the network. You can often get a PLMN allocated by your national telecoms regulator, or use one in the 999/xx range, which are set aside for private, uncoordinated use.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• Truly grateful, thanks a lot for all of this insight.
  I have recurring daydreams of booting up a fiber ISP or WISP or (thanks to this post) a micro cell network, but peeking at the real-world implementation of those is a good way to remind myself that there's a ton of complexity that I shouldn't underestimate :-) i.e. it helps to keep those dreams "grounded".
  I've built temporary 500-people ethernet + wifi networks and I'm always curious to read what it's like to do it at a larger scale. Thanks again!

  By gregsadetsky 3 years ago

• Don't force your dreams like this to be grounded!
  There is complexity in this, but remember here you're talking to people who chose to get deep down into the tech in every component out of a desire to learn, do it themselves, and save money!
  What I didn't mention was I built and ran that network effectively by myself (modulo mast climbing), with support of a few others who wanted to learn the ropes.
  A fibre ISP is absolutely achievable and there's been a few posts about those on HN recently. Depending on how you go about it, it's absolutely feasible to build out your own fibre GPON network. Heck I know people doing this who have absolutely no background in networking, but have learned the practical skills of splicing and hired in the networking knowledge to support them.
  A WISP is a bit simpler to get going than a cellular network, but you can also build one using cellular (that costs more). The big issue WISPs encounter is scaling their business and customer base up - it's easy to do lots of little point to point links in "customer obsessed" mode where you set out infrastructure to reach each rural customer. It's far harder to deliver a great service to these customers, especially as you start to distribute service from these points to multiple customers. A lot of WISPs end up with pretty messy flat networks they can't then scale up, and can't easily augment with fixed fibre to give themselves more capacity.
  You absolutely can start your own ISP or WISP. I won't go so far as to say you should, because to evaluate "should" you'd need to understand the local offerings and competitors and regulatory landscape, but it's definitely possible. In the UK, I believe from memory that something like 2 in every 3 kilometres of fibre to the premises has been laid by "non traditional" providers or new entrants, independent of the big telcos.
  Your own cellular operator is not impossible, but the scale you need to get to before you have a sellable product is the issue. You need to be (or use) a fibre ISP to get backhaul in. You need to understand site leasing and access arrangements. You'll need to be able to do radio planning and get spectrum access. You'll need billing and customer support and fault resolution. Managed services can help, but you'll rapidly see your revenues drain that way.
  In the US there are a number of smaller state-level cellular operators, who effectively do all this themselves. I wouldn't recommend trying to run a mini mobile operator as a business just yet until the supporting ecosystems get better able to serve smaller scale customers though - the rise of private networks will change this, but everyone is still thinking of national scale for now.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• > I've built temporary 500-people ethernet + wifi networks and I'm always curious to read what it's like to do it at a larger scale.
  If you’ve done this, you could do the WISP / private LTE network. Will you likely need to do a lot of research and reading? Yes. Will you occasionally make potentially costly mistakes? Yes. But will you be successful if persistent? Yes!
  As someone who owned a small WISP back in the earlier days of the Internet when finding guides was hard to do and has done a private 3G network for fun, it’s definitely doable if you set your mind to it.

  By jsjohnst 3 years ago

• Did you have to pay for the lisence? Don't these lisence normally cost something in the range of billions of dollars?

  By ackbar03 3 years ago

• No. I suspect if it was in a region people lived in and we weren't using it for research purposes, we may have had to pay, though I doubt it would cost anywhere near that order of magnitude in Greenland...

  By cozzyd 3 years ago

• If anyone knows the answers to this for USA I'd be very curious (at this time I don't see one). People are mentioning possibly using a 5ghz band?
  Very weird that the ubuntu article talks about how easy it is to do this and makes no mention of spectrum license concerns.

  By TaylorAlexander 3 years ago

• I think there needs to be a push to make it possible. It's kind of tiring having big corporations being the only ones who can do things.

  By alexfromapex 3 years ago

• There are already a lot of things that are feasible without any license. In Europe/CEPT, you might have a look at all bands under the provisions of ERC Recommendation 70-03 (https://docdb.cept.org/download/2464).
  However, those provisions are made in order to ensure a good/fair access to anyone, and therefore to prevent a single user or single technology from overusing those bands which are meant to be shared. For that purpose, there are associated restrictions (in terms of power/EIRP, duty-cycle) and/or mandatory sharing approaches (Listen-before-talk, detect-and-avoid, etc.). In the case of Wi-Fi, CSMA/CA is a form of listen-before-talk.
  Unfortunately, mobile technologies defined at 3GPP (GSM, HSPA, LTE, NR) are not designed to be used in such a way (i.e. they don't have any sharing mechanism such as LBT and they require _by design_ dedicated/licensed bands), which by the way implies some kind of specific coordination at the country borders where two operators are using the same channels... (you might look at ECC recommendation 15-01 for an example of PCI sharing).
  LAA is a way to have an LTE carrier within the (shared) 5 GHz band, but it has to rely on an anchor carrier for signaling, which requires licensed spectrum. Multefire is a fully-unlicensed solution, but I doubt many UEs (smartphones) support it, and anyway because it must implement the same power limitations and LBT as wi-fi in order to comply with regulations I doubt it would be much better than wi-fi... (maybe it would in some specific case where deterministic QoS is important)
  One more thing : keep in mind that a typical 3G/4G/5G macrocell site (e.g. around 65 dBm EIRP per carrier) is something very expensive : your mileage may vary but it can easily be around 100000 € / site when some construction is required.

  By karteum 3 years ago

• >LAA is a way to have an LTE carrier within the (shared) 5 GHz band, but it has to rely on an anchor carrier for signaling, which requires licensed spectrum.
  I want to add, as I said in my last comment that 5G NR allows for 5Ghz to be used as primary carrier, it was controversially included in the standard. A study from earlier this month showed LAA apparently doesn't play too well with wifi nearby: https://www.cs.uchicago.edu/news/article/laa-wifi/

  By joecool1029 3 years ago

• In general, cellular technologies have been designed against assumptions of a clean (or at least exclusively used) RF channel. 4G and 5G are deployed with frequency reuse between base stations, which implement the same standard and can coordinate their emissions and scheduling of clients (both in time and frequency) to minimise interference.
  WiFi is a whole different kettle of fish - it's designed to be used by multiple independent access point operators simultaneously, with the ability to change frequency if needed based on the interference observed. It's designed to try to deliver good performance by listening before transmitting etc, to avoid transmitting over another device, to avoid a tragedy of the commons scenario where selfish devices end up rendering WiFi unusable for everyone (including themselves), through refusing to yield time to devices transmitting on other networks.
  NR-U and LAA etc don't generally play according to the same rules, as they're standards arising from the world of exclusive spectrum access, and coordination of base stations by one operator - in the world of cellular, the base stations allocate uplink channels for their clients. That doesn't work in WiFi with multiple networks in the same approximate location, hence they need to try to prevent interference and cross-talk.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• 5G NR allows for 5Ghz to be used as primary carrier in band 46. (as opposed to LTE that only allows it as a secondary carrier.) This wouldn't require a license to use.
  I believe CBRS band 48 (3.5Ghz) is lightly licensed but I don't remember if you can set it up as a primary carrier on LTE.

  By joecool1029 3 years ago

• Do you know how does the patent licensing works on 5G NR-U? I have been trying to find an answer but literally everyone in the industry are mum about it.
  I really really want to see real world usage of NR-U and as a possible replacement of WiFi.

  By ksec 3 years ago

• I understand that NR-U is a full implementation of a 5G base station (and client handset/CPE if you can find one that actually implements NR-U!), and therefore you will require patent licenses for the full implemented stack.
  In an ideal world, your radio manufacturer and software vendors would have appropriate patent licenses in place.
  For this and other reasons (handset support being commercially problematic since carriers want to preserve their dominance), I don't see NR-U really replacing Wi-Fi. The friction to joining a device to a network is also far higher, and there's much more complexity in running the network and architecting a suitable core network and user plane functions and keeping it all running. WiFi really is a lot simpler in many ways.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• Well NR-U is pretty much a Qualcomm technology ( MultiFire ) brought to 3GPP for standardisation. So I expect it to be supported in all 3GPP Rel 16 modem and Qualcomm X60+ modem as well. I dont think Handset support would be a concern unless I am missing something.
  I was hoping for some exemption or special arrangement on the patent issues for consumer private 5G Network. WiFI just sucks, comparatively speaking. Including WiFI 6E. And judging from the ways they are doing things I have very little hope for 802.11ay and 802.11be ( WiFi 7 ).

  By ksec 3 years ago

• >WiFi Sucks...Including 6E
  Outta curiosity, why do you say 6E sucks?

  By socraticmethod 3 years ago

• CBRS is very US-specific...
  It is indeed an innovative way to give access to spectrum, but it's a pity it has been done in this band (which had a huge potential for usual operators in terms of site reuse).
  I suspect in Europe a light licensing approach such as CBRS might be considered in higher bands such as 26 GHz...

  By karteum 3 years ago

• Yes this was my question… The FCC is pretty aggressive about keeping people off frequencies they don’t have a license for, how does that work in these types of environments? Especially something like a college campus, where you have 10,000+ students who would all need their phones to be reprovisioned… not to mention how would it work if you walk off campus? LTE/5G isn’t really great at working with multiple networks… it just wasn’t set up that way…

  By vxNsr 3 years ago

• Does it mean that the protocol has big corporation monopoly built in by design? I am not familiar with the details, but by the sound of it why is this even legal?

  By varispeed 3 years ago

• Not really, anyone can own spectrum, in the last few years its gotten really expensive as it's become more important to building a robust network but historically it wasn't that hard to license an small band in your area.

  By vxNsr 3 years ago

• Radio spectrum is a shared resource that for many use cases needs exclusive allocation to work well - if one person/organization is using a frequency band in an area, they need to be the only ones who can use that frequency band there. Think TV or radio stations; if someone else is transmitting in the same channel, then it just disrupts the broadcast. So most such spectrum is allocated (often through auction) and then whoever has that allocation is legally granted a monopoly on the use of that spectrum, enforced by government who will prevent anyone else from using that spectrum with fines and even physical interference (finding, disconnecting and confiscating the violating transmitters) if needed.
  Transmitting over radio waves is a highly regulated privilege. There are a few ranges that are open to public (i.e. the bands used for Wifi and BT) with devices that need to be certified to ensure that they transmit only in the narrow permitted ranges, but in most frequency ranges (including the LTE/5G ranges) it is illegal to operate a transmitter without an explicit license.

  By PeterisP 3 years ago

• This was true decades ago but for the vast majority of modern applications users would be just fine sharing spectrum and dynamically negotiating/avoiding each other. If you go look at an SDR waterfall you'll find that vanishingly little spectrum is ever in use but almost all of it is reserved for various interests, mostly using legacy analog modes.
  We need more and wider unlicensed bands, there's no reason for most of this regulation anymore.

  By edrxty 3 years ago

• People pay money, sometimes quite a lot, for exclusive access even if it’s infrequently used exclusive access. It’s quite common in many industries beyond telecom as well. Do you not believe that preference exists?

  By MichaelZuo 3 years ago

• Check out CBRS which is "licensed-by-rule." You should be able to use CBRS to deploy private 5G.

  By ffk 3 years ago

• At least on paper the Japanese sXGP standard is close to what you want, it’s reportedly just TD-LTE Band 39 and equipments are licensed the same way as Wi-Fi APs and dongles are.
  Maybe if there’s enough demand for workplace private phone network, such laws could be passed to run 5G or 4G as Wi-Fi alternatives.

  By numpad0 3 years ago

• You could simply host your network on unlicensed spectrum.

  By Sephr 3 years ago

• AFAICT -- and I would be happy to see counter-evidence -- all the unlicensed spectrum suitable for LTE or 5G is in the 5-6 GHz frequencies. The physical characteristics of transmission don't change, so one might as well just deploy the cheaply available 5GHz wifi systems -- you don't get an advantage by using LTE or 5G protocols.
  i suppose if you only had relatively low data rate applications you could use 900MHz, but there's a dearth of CPE. 900MHz unlicensed has slightly more bandwidth than a single 2.4GHz wifi channel.

  By dsr_ 3 years ago

• Might as well use 8.0211ah there. It's not like you can get consumer equipment that supports the 900 MHz ISM band for LTE.

  By cozzyd 3 years ago

• You can probably drop it down some more and use tvws spectrum. Probably will be alone there

  By dilyevsky 3 years ago

• TVWS channel allocations often don't align neatly with duplex paired 3GPP bands, meaning you might need multiple adjacent TVWS channels.
  In addition, in many countries the TVWS regulations only cover specifically authorised devices which adhere to TVWS standards (which 3GPP doesn't), and create a whole host of challenges for the client devices (handsets), which don't understand TVWS rules, and need their transmit power to be controlled by the base station, which isn't necessarily aware of the client location, or authorised within TVWS rules to query the TVWS database on behalf of the client.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• Rules are different in each country of course but most unlicensed frequencies can only be used with mechanisms that leave space for other users (networks) like listen before talk or restricted duty cycles. Cellular technology isn’t built with shared access to spectrum in mind although there is/was some effort to add it (LTE-U, 5G-NR-U).

  By pgorczak 3 years ago

• Related:
  OpenLTE (Wikipedia)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenLTE
  OpenLTE (Technical Page, SourceForge)
  http://openlte.sourceforge.net/
  SourceForge OpenLTE Wiki, installing:
  https://sourceforge.net/p/openlte/wiki/Installing%20OpenLTE/
  "FPGA Implementation of LTE Downlink Transceiver with Synchronization and Equalization":
  https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.69...
  EETimes, "Implementing LTE on FPGAs":
  https://www.eetimes.com/implementing-lte-on-fpgas/#
  Also interesting is doing a Google query with "FPGA" and "LTE" and/or "OpenLTE" as the search parameters:
  https://www.google.com/search?q=FPGA+and+%28LTE+or+OpenLTE%2...
  (Also note that GNU Radio: (https://www.gnuradio.org/about/) and SDR:(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software-defined_radio) -- are related topics that may contain some overlapping areas of interest...)

  By peter_d_sherman 3 years ago

• And also OpenRAN: “The OpenRAN Project Group is an initiative to define and build 2G, 3G, 4G, and 5G RAN solutions based on general-purpose vendor-neutral hardware, open interfaces and software.”
  https://telecominfraproject.com/openran/

  By boramalper 3 years ago

• Excellent link!
  Also, for those that are new to the "RAN" terminology (as I was just a few minutes ago! <g>):
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_access_network

  By peter_d_sherman 3 years ago

• Are these part of WAN's[Wide Area Network]....?
  A RAN is mini-WAN?

  By smokelegend 3 years ago

• I would say Yes in terms of size: usually most of RANs are nationwide.
  But No in term of type: RAN is a functional part of operator operational network and therefore not as function and traffic neutral as a WAN is.

  By philprx 3 years ago

• This is a list of open source tools to do this https://open5g.info/
  Something important that may be overlooked in the blog post is that for most bands you need licenses to transmit over the air. ISM bands are unlicensed but may come with other limitations (e.g., in some countries regulators require a listen-before-talk mechanism that is not always implemented in cellular stacks).

  By mychele 3 years ago

• All the examples in the blogpost is areas where you own the property, and in most countries can deploy this if you are careful not to interfere with areas outside of your property. With 5G this is easier because you can use ISM bands within the “core” and WiFi closer to the edge.

  By punnerud 3 years ago

• I'm a little confused about how UE authentication works with open source cellular. Are there re-programmable SIMs that you need to buy? Or it only works with virtual SIM cards written in software on non-commercial equipment.
  To ask simply; could I expect to easily connect my iPhone to one of these networks?

  By nixpulvis 3 years ago

• Yes, programmable SIM cards.
  https://www.smartjac.biz/mobile-telecom/sim-cards/4g-lte-sim...
  Buy pre-programmed or invest in a programmer + a bunch of blanks.

  By bserge 3 years ago

• Does this work with eSIMs?

  By toomuchtodo 3 years ago

• Unfortunately not - eSim is a fairly closed-shop ecosystem. You can't easily type in the provisioning parameters into a QR code generator and get an eSim to use.
  You need to work with a GSMA-approved eSim issuer who has a special CA-signed certificate to authorise a handshake via some cellular standard protocols to do the eSim setup process. This process does prevent keying material being exchanged in plaintext, but also "locks in" the need for an intermediary in the process unfortunately.
  So while you could make eSims, you'd need to work with a GSMA-approved issuer.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• That's unfortunate. Is it possible bypass this restriction on a rooted Android phone, or is it implemented in hardware?

  By grishka 3 years ago

• As far as I know, eSIMs are usually implemented in physical hardware, close to (or maybe even on) the baseband, but independent from the baseband firmware.
  This is because they are considered a trusted execution environment; if they weren't, it would be possible to "clone" eSIM instances.

  By lxgr 3 years ago

• Afaik, it has little to do with the user-facing software, you need access to the baseband modem part.

  By bserge 3 years ago

• Do you know why is this a closed shop? Is there a legal reason or whichever corporation controls it ensured that they have a monopoly? Is there a way to open this up?

  By varispeed 3 years ago

• From memory, I believe GSMA (the industry association that helps to keep mobile technology dominated by carriers that hold exclusively licensed spectrum, if you're cynical) require everyone who provides eSim to have been security audited. They can then get access to a trusted certificate that will be able to sign the handshake to the embedded security module (eSim).
  It's complex, but remember that in the traditional world view of mobile, the carrier "owns" the SIM, and the handset, and the network itself. When the carrier can't control the SIM in its entirety, you need to have someone brokering the relationship here between everyone - otherwise a carrier coming onto a device may lack confidence the device isn't compromised by the previous network that served it.
  Some information that might help you start look around the topic - https://pages.arm.com/rs/312-SAX-488/images/GSMA_eSIM_Certif...

  By g_p 3 years ago

• eSIM implementations need to be closed because they are considered a secure execution environment for loading eSIM profiles (in that it should not be possible to extract the keys contained in a profile).
  I'm not actually sure if there is a good reason for the eSIM profile server (called SM-DP+ in the language of the specs) to be part of the same trusted computing base; maybe defense in depth against a malicious profile/SAT applet trying to access the data of others on the same eSIM?

  By lxgr 3 years ago

• This would be super useful if it could me made to work on the secondary eSIM for iDevices.

  By mnd999 3 years ago

• [deleted]

  By

  A PHP Error was encountered

  Severity: Notice

  Message: Undefined property: stdClass::$user

  Filename: views/hn.php

  Line Number: 116

  3 years ago

• You don't need hardware for that. Just need to be able to program your own carrier profile... which I guess is very hard to impossible for the average person.

  By bserge 3 years ago

• What do you mean by "carrier profile"? An eSIM profile?

  By lxgr 3 years ago

• I'm not sure about 4G, but certainly with some of the earlier variants it was relatively easy to make your local DIY network visible as 'foreign' roaming network to your phone with it's normal SIM.

  By X-Cubed 3 years ago

• How does one go about getting access in the US to use a frequency that can cover a large area per access point?
  I've worked in remote mines before which heavily use telemetry and they all seem to be on 2.4 ghz mesh networks. IIRC they need an access point every half a mile or less and are expensive to maintain.
  If you could install just one tower in a mine in the office and have the entire area covered, it would be a game changer.

  By vsskanth 3 years ago

• CBRS (3.55-3.7GHz) has been available for over a year now in the US. I’ve worked with a few mines that are deploying it to get a larger coverage area than WiFi. You should start by speaking with one of the SAS vendors, e.g. Federated Wireless.

  By bradstimpson 3 years ago

• in case you are interested: In germany (DE) the regulator offers 5G (actually technology neutral) offers local, campus licenses at a very low price: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Sachgebiete/Telekommunik...
  1 year, 10MHz, 1km2 residential-> 1300€

  By ng55QPSK 3 years ago

• Also check out the open source work of Helium and FreedomFi, who are working to help individuals easily deploy 5G/LTE offload for major carriers and get paid for data usage.
  https://freedomfi.com/helium5g/

  By rawrmaan 3 years ago

• Please don't do this. Not only is this a violation of the agreement between you and the ISP, but consumer internet pipes were never designed for this type of service. This is only feasible if the internet coming to your house is a business line, which it won't be if you live in a residential area.

  By glitchc 3 years ago

• If I pay for unlimited data at XMbps, I expect to be able to use as much data as I want. If I cannot then ISPs should advertise more honestly.
  Plus, I'd be very surprised in Comcast Business was actually using separate infrastructure.

  By KingMachiavelli 3 years ago

• Your license probably doesn't have a provision for subletting.

  By echelon 3 years ago

• Does screen-sharing and letting someone control your screen count as "subletting"? Does inviting someone to join your local Minecraft game (which internally starts a server and exposes it to the internet) count as subletting?
  If your ISP sells you a service of X Mbps (and if they want to be more precise, X packets per second and X total data transferred in a month) you should be able to use it for any purpose you want. The purpose or content of said packet don't suddenly make it take more network resources.
  If ISP's networks suddenly can't cope because people start using what they've paid for then it's on them and they need to price it accordingly and market it more honestly.

  By Nextgrid 3 years ago

• ISPs should advertise more honestly, but if they started talking about contention ratios in their advertising the average consumer would rapidly lose interest.
  With business, it’s not separate infrastructure necessarily but the number of customers sharing the same infrastructure is significantly lower. This leads to more consistent speeds and less congestion.
  Edit: fuck you downvoters - this is comment is both accurate and helpful.

  By mnd999 3 years ago

• It's not though. Sure what you say may be correct in some amount but it has little to do with the comment you responded to and isn't much more than excuse for why ISPs take advantage of their (largely) monopoly powers in the residential internet space.
  The reason you don't get a consistent speed and a guarantee as a residential ISP client isn't because of any of the reasons you mentioned. It's because ISPs can force you to pay for their service at whatever price they charge and no matter how bad it is.
  The internet could be out for 8 hours a day, you could get sub-dialup speeds consistently, you simply can't connect to some services for some inexplicable reason, or your packet loss could be so bad that you get kicked from services and pages constantly. Guess what, you are still going to pay for it because what's the alternative? No internet at all or satellite internet that goes out whenever a cloud is in the sky and that alots you 1GB a month at 56kbps for 200USD/month.
  No matter what a residential ISP does, they will still get their money and even if you service is complete trash you'll grin and bare it lest you end up without access at all. That's the reason we don't get consistent service with residential plans and it won't change until something happens to break us out of the monopolistic regulatory captured environment we are in.

  By jacoblambda 3 years ago

• Yes, the US residential market would definitely benefit from more competition.
  The model we have here is to separate the infrastructure from the service such that infrastructure providers lay fibre to homes and businesses and then sell wholesale to ISPs who sell service over the common fibre to consumers. It’s definitely better than the US model as there is competition between ISPs and they therefore have reason to apply pressure to get problems fixed. Infrastructure upgrades are still painfully slow as there is little competitive reason to upgrade the fibre (or fibre / copper VDSL in many places) as all the ISPs have little choice but use the infra provider for a certain area.
  Ideally you want more infra, but the cost of building out fibre networks is high, particularly if you’re only selling to 1-in-2 or 1-in-3 properties due to competition. That’s before you get to the politics and legals and lobbying you need to do to succeed in the US. I’m hopeful 5G will compete with broadband and give the providers the kick up the ass they need.

  By mnd999 3 years ago

• > the average consumer would rapidly lose interest.
  On the contrary, in a lot of places most consumers complain about misleading claims about speed and capping.
  The average consumer understands that daily rates for a hotel room change based on season, day of the week, special events and room size.
  Paying variable data rates based on usage and guaranteed bandwidth is not more difficult.

  By goodpoint 3 years ago

• > ISPs should advertise more honestly, but if they started talking about contention ratios in their advertising the average consumer would rapidly lose interest.
  In short, they have to lie to get business? Why is that even legal?

  By varispeed 3 years ago

• I'm surprised by how downvoted you are. It is kind of obvious that it is a violation to me here, since we have a history of people reselling their bandwith in blocks of flats.

  By przemub 3 years ago

• People feel entitled to their internet access without consideration of infrastructure costs, especially in North America. They see symmetric multi-GB connections commonly offered in countries such as Japan, South Korea and Singapore, and wonder why it can’t be done in the US.
  Population density is why: Singapore is ~8400 people per square kilometre, while the US is a scant 36 per square km. That’s two orders of magnitude difference. Everything else follows from this (high prices, single provider, spotty last mile service, etc.)

  By glitchc 3 years ago

• Population density is often used as an excuse for this, but it's a weak excuse.
  Finland has less population density than USA and manages to solve these issues; NYC has more density than Singapore and still has the same problems with internet access and pricing as the less dense areas of USA.
  No, it's not about the population density, the key difference is in the lack of competition.

  By PeterisP 3 years ago

• > People feel entitled to their internet access without consideration of infrastructure costs, especially in North America.
  What? People are paying the infrastructure costs through their internet bill. If the ISP is pricing it wrong or is mis-representing what they're selling then it's the ISP's fault and not the customers'. The ISP is free to change prices and/or change their marketing to represent the true nature and capability of the service they're selling.

  By Nextgrid 3 years ago

• This is true, but even in US locations with high population density, we still don't have symmetric multi gig connections. Instead, we 1 or 2 choices for a wired ISP: generally cable / DOCSIS and DSL. And around here, PSTN copper is literally rotting on the poles, so DSL is out. Fiber is supposed to be installed "soon" (I estimated 1 to 2 years.)

  By icedchai 3 years ago

• im going to do it

  By gjs278 3 years ago

• Wow, letting anyone use my network as a back haul in exchange for a cryptocurrency I’ve never heard of.
  Sign me up.

  By rhexs 3 years ago

• [deleted]

  By

  A PHP Error was encountered

  Severity: Notice

  Message: Undefined property: stdClass::$user

  Filename: views/hn.php

  Line Number: 106

  3 years ago

• I remember a customer in Italy that in the warehouse didn't have a good enough reception, so he to install a 3G repeater inside to be able to use the phone. After a few weeks, financial police arrived to his place, ordered to shutdown everything and fined him in 5 digits Euro.

  By rullopat 3 years ago

• I used to work on UMTS networks about a decade back and fresh out of college it was quite daunting. At that time I wanted to study an opensource implementation to gain more understanding but I couldn't find any. Glad to see this in the present time

  By srinathkrishna 3 years ago

• I have been thinking about how to do a deployment on a farm, using a private 5G network for some sensors and security cameras. I looked at LoraWann but it didn't have the bandwidth for cameras. Would something like this work?

  By stevejb 3 years ago

• This could get interesting at defcon conferences (if they're still a thing), which is already famous for having the world's most hostile wifi networks. Now DIY, private stingray?

  By eplanit 3 years ago

• See also RENEW, the “world’s first fully programmable and open-source Massive-MIMO Platform” which may help to provide open source hardware and firmware for high-end installations. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24026416

  By rckoepke 3 years ago

• https://www.ebay.com/itm/FULL-LTE-GSM-Network-IN-A-BOX-NIB-O...

  By aQutePsyOps 3 years ago

• On a related note, the Pine64 folks are working on the PineDio, which will use LoRa https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinedio

  By hoppyhoppy2 3 years ago

• There will also soon be a LoRa addon board (backpanel) for the PinePhone that'll be powered by an ATtiny84! A working port of meshtastic for this device would be very interesting.
  https://wiki.pine64.org/images/b/bc/Pinephone_LoRa_BackPanel...

  By e2le 3 years ago

• LoRa is incredibly slow at scale due to the shared spectrum and extremely asymmetrical. Also entirely proprietary and patented.

  By goodpoint 3 years ago

• This is not new to 5G. I believe it was HAR2009 that ran its own GSM network. Not sure if it included 3G, but probably not. So use was limited, but still cool that it was possible.

  By mcv 3 years ago

• CCC events have ran 2G infra for ages, and since recently there was also 3G and 4G. There were even workshops where you could operate a femtocell.

  By seba_dos1 3 years ago

• Can someone educate me as to a/the use case for this?
  Does this mean you are providing cell service to others? or is there another purpose for it?

  By akulbe 3 years ago

• It's a mechanism to use 5G protocols for a localized WAN, not anything to do with phone carriers.

  By rswail 3 years ago

• Do you need a different SIM to connect to a private network or you can use a commercial one (Verizon etc..)?

  By devops000 3 years ago

• LTE and 5G use something like pre-shared keys for both user and operator so no to the second option in most cases except emergency use (you can make emergency calls via any network).

  By pgorczak 3 years ago

• [deleted]

  By

  A PHP Error was encountered

  Severity: Notice

  Message: Undefined property: stdClass::$user

  Filename: views/hn.php

  Line Number: 101

  3 years ago

• Interesting. Why don't mesh networking projects switch to this?

  By orblivion 3 years ago

• "Mobile networks are much more secure than WiFi."
  Would like to see this claim substantiated. TLS protocol runs the same on either pipe.

  By landemva 3 years ago

• The threat posture of both networks is quite different. As a user, as you rightly point out, TLS means it doesn't matter to you much!
  But if you turn it around and thinks about the problem as a business user, where you have some ancient legacy systems that can't do TLS, you can set up a private APN for authorised users, and connect that APN over a VPN or dedicated private leased line to the insecure service. The mobile network itself has a different set of security assumptions that make this possible.
  Client isolation by default prevents other devices from probing your device like they can on a wrongly configured wireless LAN.
  The authentication keys to join the network cannot be stolen by a compromised phone or phone firmware. An authorized user can't let another unauthorized user access the network using credential sharing. Swapping SIM into another device can be detected and the join attempt rejected.
  Long term authentication secrets sit in hardware protected storage in the SIM and core network - radios and base stations never see long term key material. If you join a roaming network, key material remains secure and the roaming network gets scoped keys that only work on their roaming network.
  That's not to say any of this is impossible to do with radius and other systems like 802.1x, but it's the default in cellular. As an end user though, TLS is most probably good enough for you, as you say. Put your DNS over TLS and if in doubt use a VPN. A cellular network will offer you much more protection against ARP spoofing by another client device peer, a sensible modern system won't be bothered by this. It's a different threat model and perspective where cellular is more secure - as an individual you might not be too bothered.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• That’s an interesting claim though considering mobile network standards have for the longest time had (intentionally) weak crypto and anyone could spoof being a provider (eg stingray). I’m sure wifi has its flaws but “user could potentially misconfigure a network” is different from “this network has one or more intentional back doors but it’s configured correctly other than that”

  By vlovich123 3 years ago

• 4G/5G is pretty good on security, compared to 2G :)

  By samat 3 years ago

• Shit is illegal in Europe. /thread

  By boba7 3 years ago

• FTFY: Shit needs a license (or a proper lab environment) in Europe, like approximately everywhere in the world.

  By detaro 3 years ago

• > Shit needs a license, money, connections, bribes
  FTFY
  You can't just get a license if you don't know right people and you don't have suitcases of money ready to pass under the table.

  By varispeed 3 years ago

• It isn't an under the table thing, at least in the UK. For the generalloy used frequency bands for this, there was an auction for the spectrum. You can get access to parts not being used by the people who bid on it.
  You can also get an amateur radio license, and use frequency not normally used for this, but that probably means using SDR as most devices designed to use LTE will only work on normal LTE bands etc.
  No bribes, connections, or anything shady etc needed.

  By sipos 3 years ago

• There's also around 400 MHz of dedicated sharing-only spectrum in mobile bands, available in the UK at a flat price per 10 MHz required.
  (Replying to GP)
  At least in the UK, no bribes or envelopes of cash required. Nobody is going to want to help someone try to get started from scratch, but the spectrum access isn't anything like what you fear, at least in the UK. No connections required, the forms are all available online, and if you ask nicely and want bulk licences, you can use a spreadsheet instead for your requests, which is a bit less hassle than PDF forms.

  By g_p 3 years ago

• Depends. Temporary, e.g. for an event, can often be done (although usually by operating under someone elses license, not getting one from scratch), with 5G there's likely some interest in femtocell setups where afaik some states are looking into special local licensing. But generally yes, difficult club to get into.

  By detaro 3 years ago

• We were talking about Europe, not China.

  By beervirus 3 years ago