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Harald Welte laforge at gnumonks.orgHi WoMax,
On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 02:20:44PM +0100, WoMax wrote:
> If there is a solution for UMTS (W-CDMA) coming, we don't need the expensive
> nanoBTS anymore.
Yes and no. UMTS Node-B's and Home-Node-B are 3G only, i.e. will not work
with the > 66% of all the phones that are actively in use even in developed
countries.
> BTW I've still one for sale ... see at http://umts.zerber.us
I would like to kindly ask you to refrain from further advertising your
product sales on this mailing list. I think people will easily find your
messages in the archives.
And no, I have no commercial motivation. BS-11 are sold out, and I think
even for those I've never really actively made advertisements on this list.
> There are cheap W-CDMA BTS's out there, like Netgear DVG834GH, AT&T 3G
> Microcell, Alcatel-Lucent 9365 or the Vodafone Access Gateway you can buy in
> England for just 160 GBP each.
We're very well aware about this. Dieter, myself and others have been
playing around with them a bit. Biggest issue is that there is no standard
protocol like A-bis, and every vendor seems to have its own proprietary
hacks. There actually is a IuH standard protocol, but that doesn't seem
to be used much [yet?].
> All the femtocell's I know have built in GPS for timebase and security
> reason, so there is a lot to do for our purpose ...
At least one in the list that you have indicated above does not have GPS
but rather a GSM modem for that purpsoe. Also, the security is implemented
in the core network (HMB gateway or beyond), not in the femtocells themselves.
> I guess the future is W-CDMA and I hope there will be openUMTS available
> soon ;-)
I'm not so sure. The capacity of those units is typically also very limited,
as well as the transmit power... it always depends on the application.
The biggest challenge for working with 3G is ASN.1 PER, as I have indicated
in my blog. The only open source asn.1 tool that support all the required
language features, as well as PER aligned and unaligned encoding is asn1ct,
part of the Erlang distribution. And while Erlang might be a great programming
language, it is exotic and not many people know how to program it.
So unless somebody will implement the RNC + MSC functionality in Erlang, or
write useful asn.1 tools for C and adapt OpenBSC, I don't see much progress
in the Open Soruce 3G protocols area...
Cheers,
Harald
--
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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