OsmocomBB hardware migration to SDR

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Alexander Chemeris alexander.chemeris at gmail.com
Fri Jun 24 11:30:11 UTC 2016


On Fri, Jun 24, 2016 at 11:33 AM, Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 06:45:45PM +0600, Вадим Яницкий wrote:
>> It's no secret for everyone, that today OsmocomBB is not actively maintained
>> as well as OpenBSC, for example.
>
> This is true, but even OpenBSC and related projects are suffering from a
> lack of attention.  Despite being one of the founders of sysmocom, I
> really don't like to see the development and maintenance responsibility
> within one entity (or, let's say Holger and me privately, and sysmocom
> asa company).  We need more contributors in all Osmocom projects.

I think telecom in general has been lacking attention from open-source
developers. How bad is that when every vendor, even the smallest one
has its own proprietary SS7 stack.

>> I think it's mostly due to supported hardware limitations.
>
> Honestly, I'm not sure.  The big difference is that there are commercial
> users of OpenBSC, OsmoBTS, etc., and they can afford to fund some of the
> work on those projects.  For OsmocomBB I don't think there's much of a
> chacne for commercial interest.  You can buy an entire phone for USD 10
> these days, including a license for the protocol stack / software - so
> why bother investing in a "new" implementation of GSM.
>
> There are some exceptions like test devices or virtual phones for load
> generation, but those are also not interesting to most people anymore in
> 2016.

I second this.

The whole reason the work for SDR support for OsmocomBB started back
then, was because we had some funding available for this. Since then I
haven't seen anyone commercially interested in supporting OsmocomBB,
which is quite unfortunate. It's not impossible to get it to a state
when there will be commercial use for it, but it's so much work (GPRS,
EDGE, 3G...) that either someone really stubborn should do it for
free, or someone really philanthropic should fund this. That said, I
hope that either one of the other will happen and we'll see it
working.

-- 
Regards,
Alexander Chemeris.
CEO, Fairwaves, Inc.
https://fairwaves.co



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