Ericsson RBS6000 surplus situation
Hello fellow Osmocomers, I just recently came across and watched Harald's ODC 2018 presentation about Ericsson RBS 6000. The part that intrigued me: Harald said in that year that this hardware was available quite inexpensively and plentifully; he said that a DUG10+RUG pair could be had for around 300 EUR in that year. My question to the community: what is the current situation 6 y later? Is there still any above-zero supply of either DUG10+RUG or DUG20+RUS surplus hardware? If a nonzero supply does exist, what is the typical price these days? In that 2018 presentation Harald also mentioned that the successor to DUG20 was DUS31/DUS41, and that those DUS units (which support GSM, WCDMA and LTE all in one box) have integrated SIU02 equivalent instead of native E1 interfaces. Hence question: has anyone in Osmocom cracked the E1-over-IP protocol spoken by SIU02 and its later incarnations, allowing Osmocom CNI to drive the GSM part of DUS31 etc, or is such operation beyond our current community capabilities? There are rumors going around that T-Mobile USA may be shutting down some Ericsson 2G equipment (though I still never got any clear answers as to what equipment it might be, if any), hence I am trying to brush up on my knowledge of this platform. M~
Hi Mychaela, On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 06:15:08PM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
My question to the community: what is the current situation 6 y later? Is there still any above-zero supply of either DUG10+RUG or DUG20+RUS surplus hardware? If a nonzero supply does exist, what is the typical price these days?
I think the best way to figure that out is to contact the usual surplus traders, whom you already know from your codec experience. The exact part numbers of DUL, DUG, the related cables etc. should all be in the osmocom wiki, AFAIR.
In that 2018 presentation Harald also mentioned that the successor to DUG20 was DUS31/DUS41, and that those DUS units (which support GSM, WCDMA and LTE all in one box)
I may have been quoting wrong documentation when I made that statement. There are some userse who claim that [at least with the software they have], the DUS31/41 can only do LTE. My personal recommendation would be to stick with DUG20 + DUL20
Hence question: has anyone in Osmocom cracked the E1-over-IP protocol spoken by SIU02 and its later incarnations,
I wrote the wireshark dissectors and submitted them to upstream wireshark "back in the day", the core of it is in epan/dissectors/packet-{ehdlc,gsm_abis_pgsl,gsm_abis_tfp}.c of the wireshark source code. We have also implemented a proof-of-concept as osmo-el2tpd which can be found at https://gitea.osmocom.org/cellular-infrastructure/osmo-el2tpd As far as I recall, we only implemented the GPRS/EGPRS integration (so OML, RSL and the "GPRS TRau frame equivalent"), and not the Voice (TRAU) frame integration. So you could (at some point) run osmo-bsc with bsc-colocated PCU and osmo-el2tpd talking to a SIU2 talking to a DUG02. osmo-el2tpd exposes the TFP (the Ericsson Abis/IP equivalent of TRAU frames) on a unix domain socket, but I don't think we ever integrated that into osmo-mgw somehow. All information is known.
allowing Osmocom CNI to drive the GSM part of DUS31 etc, or is such operation beyond our current community capabilities?
I don't think anyone has tried Abis/IP with a DUSxx or BBxxxx. But with a real SIU02, it was definitely working. Of course the code may have bit-rot by now. -- - Harald Welte <laforge@osmocom.org> https://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)
Alternatively, is there a different/less expensive 2G/GPRS/EDGE radio hardware platform that is better supported by Osmocom? I've been eyeballing some Ericcson RBS gear as well. Also, for those of you running RBS, what solution are you using for powering it? Thank you! -Ben ________________________________ From: Harald Welte <laforge@osmocom.org> Sent: Tuesday, September 17, 2024 5:00 AM To: Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org> Cc: openbsc@lists.osmocom.org <openbsc@lists.osmocom.org> Subject: Re: Ericsson RBS6000 surplus situation Hi Mychaela, On Mon, Sep 16, 2024 at 06:15:08PM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
My question to the community: what is the current situation 6 y later? Is there still any above-zero supply of either DUG10+RUG or DUG20+RUS surplus hardware? If a nonzero supply does exist, what is the typical price these days?
I think the best way to figure that out is to contact the usual surplus traders, whom you already know from your codec experience. The exact part numbers of DUL, DUG, the related cables etc. should all be in the osmocom wiki, AFAIR.
In that 2018 presentation Harald also mentioned that the successor to DUG20 was DUS31/DUS41, and that those DUS units (which support GSM, WCDMA and LTE all in one box)
I may have been quoting wrong documentation when I made that statement. There are some userse who claim that [at least with the software they have], the DUS31/41 can only do LTE. My personal recommendation would be to stick with DUG20 + DUL20
Hence question: has anyone in Osmocom cracked the E1-over-IP protocol spoken by SIU02 and its later incarnations,
I wrote the wireshark dissectors and submitted them to upstream wireshark "back in the day", the core of it is in epan/dissectors/packet-{ehdlc,gsm_abis_pgsl,gsm_abis_tfp}.c of the wireshark source code. We have also implemented a proof-of-concept as osmo-el2tpd which can be found at https://gitea.osmocom.org/cellular-infrastructure/osmo-el2tpd As far as I recall, we only implemented the GPRS/EGPRS integration (so OML, RSL and the "GPRS TRau frame equivalent"), and not the Voice (TRAU) frame integration. So you could (at some point) run osmo-bsc with bsc-colocated PCU and osmo-el2tpd talking to a SIU2 talking to a DUG02. osmo-el2tpd exposes the TFP (the Ericsson Abis/IP equivalent of TRAU frames) on a unix domain socket, but I don't think we ever integrated that into osmo-mgw somehow. All information is known.
allowing Osmocom CNI to drive the GSM part of DUS31 etc, or is such operation beyond our current community capabilities?
I don't think anyone has tried Abis/IP with a DUSxx or BBxxxx. But with a real SIU02, it was definitely working. Of course the code may have bit-rot by now. -- - Harald Welte <laforge@osmocom.org> https://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)
Hi Harald,
I think the best way to figure that out is to contact the usual surplus traders, whom you already know from your codec experience.
I'll start by asking shields-e. From my TRAU experience I got the impression that shields-e are on the upper end of price range compared to others (while the less expensive trader company refused to sell to me because I wasn't legitimate enough for them), but it will be a start.
I may have been quoting wrong documentation when I made that statement. There are some userse who claim that [at least with the software they have], the DUS31/41 can only do LTE.
Seeing that DUS31/41 can only do LTE makes me wonder. Right now in my geographic area T-Mobile serve both GSM and LTE (and maybe 5G) with Ericsson equipment, though no idea exactly what. They are itching to shut down GSM. If Ericsson never integrated GSM as a pure software option into their LTE-centric (or 5G-centric) digital units, does it mean that T-Mobile's current GSM service must be operating with physical DUG 20 units? (Which would then presumably flood the surplus market upon shutdown...) Or do you know if they did eventually get GSM working as a pure software option in later LTE/5G digital units? M~
We power the SUP, DUG, DUL, RUS units with some industrial PSU 48v from for example the brand "MEANWELL". 600 Watt version is not excessively expensive. We did get a couple of PSU 01 (I think that is BML 161 174/1) partly because I was interested in seeing if I could just connect to the EC system and then monitor such as input voltages and current draw with the DUG. One of them died very shortly after an ex-colleague shorted the output while trying to jury-rig the very proprietary connector. So one might assume they are not abuse proof, fair enough. Of course, with all this decommissioned gear, you never know quite what you get or what it's history is. Also, it's designed to go into an enclosure, you'll need to cool it somehow, not a difficult task, but requires effort. All in all, I wouldn't bother with them, Adding a fan to something like the meanwell is not hard, but actually I haven't had problems with them with only ambient cooling. We do now have a fancy solar system, designed at a national university, with isolated configurable multivoltage outputs so we can run both - and + ground systems off the same battery bank, with both panel and AC (grid) input. I'm pretty sure the design specs of that thing are open. Not sure where they may have been published though. We've stopped trying to acquire more Digital and Radio units for the time being, but as far as I am aware, (I wasn't directly in charge or involved really in acquisitions), the surplus suppliers did have quite some availability of DUG/DUL units. What we found hard to source was Band 5 RUS. I did recently glance at ebay looking for a DUS; There can be issues with the firmware on these units, and I was wondering if the DUS might have something more recent available. I didn't get anything, but I did see some DUS available and they were not "relatively" expensive. Now, IF one were to really desire to run a production 2G cell using Erissson surplus gear, I'd concur with Harald, use the DUG/RUS. You're going to find hiccups already with that and some bugs that still need to be ironed out to make it production ready. I haven't had a lot of success with the GPRS/EDGE on it, - it has been observed to "work" under laboratory conditions with certain UEs, although I imagine that it is probably very close to a possible production network, it may just need more people to actually test and fix with a variety of phones and configurations. If the desire to not to run a production network, but to fix and create further implementations of whatever in FOSS, then I guess it's up to whoever wants to do it to decide if they want to put effort into SIU or whatever. Anyway, a quick glance at ebay (not to promote that site) will show that there is a bunch of DUS/DUG/RUS etc gear available, not far off the 300 yoyos that were mentioned in 2018 for a DU/RU combo, albeit sold "as is" so you may run the risk of getting some dead gear.
Hi Mychaela, On Tue, Sep 17, 2024 at 09:31:22AM -0800, Mychaela Falconia wrote:
If Ericsson never integrated GSM as a pure software option into their LTE-centric (or 5G-centric) digital units,
Oh they did. For sure from the BBxxxx units onwards (BB5212, BB5216, BB6630, ...). We just have seen mixed claims about the DUXxx -- - Harald Welte <laforge@osmocom.org> https://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)
participants (4)
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Ben Huntsman -
Harald Welte -
Keith -
Mychaela Falconia