Hi all! As some of you know, we will again have an OpenBSC field test at the Chaos Communication Congress from December 27-30 in Berlin / Germany. I have already applied for the license from the regulatory authority. No feedback yet, but I expect no problems, as it is more or less what we had last year. The only difference is that I've asked for 6 ARFCN (5 last year). It will again be a nanoBTS / GSM 1800 setup. Regarding the overall setup, I want to deviate from what we had last year in the following way: 1) Issue our own SIM cards to permit Authentication + Encryption. This is the perfect way how we can have a A5/1 based network that people can use to play with airprobe + Kraken - without violating any laws. In practise, this will mean we use 16in1 SIM cards, I have already bought 1000 of them. It also means that the GSM helpdesk will have to issue those SIMC cards. I would suggest we simply sell them (as opposed to providing them for a deposit, as we then would have to take back a lot of cards and return money, which is a lot of overhead). We will keep a database of all the IMSI + Ki tuples that we have issued, which we will use as HLR + AuC. This database will be persistent, i.e. at other events like the CCC camp 2011 or 28C3 we expect those SIM cards to be used again without any registration. 2) Provide GPRS + EDGE services using OsmoSGSN and OpenGGSN. I am not sure how stable this will run - but we have a good chacne of catching bugs in our code by running at the event. We will be able to provide real-world IP addresses to every mobile phone, without filter and without NAT ! I am not yet sure how we will deal with dividing the timeslots between GSM and GPRS. The dynamic TCH / PDCH code in OpenBSC hasn't ever been tested, so we might use a static configuration - potentially changing that static config depending on the usage pattern / load we see. 3) Make dual-TRX setups standard (3 BTS with 2TRX each) This is simply to enhance the capacity, particularly of SDCCH/8 resources 4) Consider putting all BTS in the same location area This will significantly reduce our need for signalling channels, but at the expense we no longer know where a particular phone is located in the building. Thus, we might make this optional and see if it is needed for load reasons. 5) Improve the SMS situation The current SMS code still sucks really bad. We don't want this inside OpenBSC, and we still don't do timer-based / automatic delivery. Using the manual 'sms send pending' command causes severe blockage if the queue is getting too large. I will try to squeeze in some time to rewrite this code and make it run as external process. 6) User registration So we sell SIM cards with a pre-programmed IMSI + Ki, but how do we enable users to assign a phone number to them? Ideally I would want them to simply register a phone number at the eventphone.de GURU web interface ahead of the event. But how do we match the IMSI and the phone number? Ask users to simply state the phone number they registered? How do we get some kind of authentication? Comments and additions are most welcome, Harald -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)