Thanks for all the answers.
Maybe you heard about the Village-Telco Mesh Potato project? That started out with a router based of openwrt / dd-wrt, and then designed their own Mesh Potato. It is an embedded Asterisk with wifi and mesh networking.
With SDR (software defined radio) would it not be possible to design / develop a cheap GSM basestation? I am a total noob on hardware development but I suppose there is a large market for this. Or maybe somebody already working on reverse engineering other base stations like the nanobts?
If one wanted to design a base station controller, what would be needed? Do you really need something like http://www.percello.com/prc6000.php Or might something simpler be possible with modifying a router and with a different antenna on 1800mhz?
Albert
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Harald Welte laforge@gnumonks.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 01:00:07PM +0200, Sylvain Munaut wrote:
The nanoBTS from ipaccess is costing euro 3450 Mind you this is without
any
software or server, just a single nanoBTS unit.
I thing several things contribute to the high price:
- That's part of ip.access revenue stream, they need to make money
 - Quantity: There is probably much more femtocell made than nanoBTS
 Regarding quantity: 3G femtocells in single quantities are also quite expensive! Only if you buy them in volume (as an operator) they become that cheap.
Furthermore, even the nanoBTS becomes _much_ cheaper when you buy it in volume (let's say 1000 units or more)
--
- Harald Welte laforge@gnumonks.org
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