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> � � � � � http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
============================================================================
"Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option."
� � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � �(ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)