[ansible]

Fully support the initiative for an open baseband.

I would love to live in a world where this can happen. But we don't live in that world.

The carriers have paid billions of dollars for exclusive use of their frequency bands. And their hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue depend upon smooth operation of all devices on the network using those bands. They will use whatever means to protect this.

OK, so let's talk to the FCC (and all the other agencies around the world), and get some other frequency band we can use for our totally open phones.

Well... there aren't any open ones left in the good range of approximately 700MHz to 2GHz. This is the part of the frequency spectrum that has decent carrying capacity, good penetration, and not too high power requirements. It is basic physics. Go lower in frequency, and you can't carry enough bits to be useful. Go higher in frequency and you start getting stopped by walls and such.

All the good bands have been allocated in the USA and elsewhere for TV, existing carriers, military, satellite, and so on. At a minimum, you'd need tens of billions to lobby for and buy a decent chunk of spectrum. And you need to get the current users moved off, which they won't like.

All we have left are the 'crap' bands like 2.4GHz (microwave oven interference). 5GHz isn't too bad (not a lot of other interferers) but it is short range with the current regulations. Another open band for unlicensed use at 60GHz gets stopped by walls, air (oxygen)...

[IgorPartola]

I don't understand. If I come to a carrier and say "Here's a codebase for your baseband. It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now.

Also, is there any harm in just open sourcing their baseband code? It seems to me that it's worthless without the license to use the frequency anyways, so who cares if the code is open from a losing business point of view. On the other hand, things like security review are to the carriers' and manufacturers' benefit, no?

[ansible]

If I come to a carrier and say "Here's a codebase for your baseband.

The carriers don't want baseband code, they just want finished products to sell.

It's OSS, well tested, secure, and supported. Buy support from me." why won't they go for it. Surely, an OSS solution is cheaper for them than developing an in-house crap solution that I'm sure it is now.

OK, assuming you get a current-generation baseband chip for free (it actually costs a ton of money to develop) with full documentation, you're still talking hundreds of millions to develop that software. GSM (a 2G technology) is complicated. UMTS / HSPA (one of the 3G techs) is an order of magnitude more complex. LTE (4G) is another order of magnitude more complex than 3G. The baseband code, plus all the testing code, plus all the testing required by the FCC, standards bodies and the carriers is a ton of money.

It costs millions to take an existing chipset (which has already been approved), an existing baseband codebase (which has also already been approved for use with that chipset) and put that into a modem and get that approved.

The chip vendors have their own baseband code now, and they are all in fierce competition with each other. They aren't going to just use your code, and they aren't going to let you use their chips either.

[IgorPartola]

OK, thanks for the explanation. So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing and not wanting to have their code exposed for fear that others might copy their chip + code when the vender is the one paying all the fees to make the chip + code usable. I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose), except perhaps even more entrenched and without much hope of a community reverse engineering a solution.

This sucks. Do we have any alternatives? Are there any completely open radio chips in development?

[noselasd]

> except perhaps even more entrenched

By a lot. On the plus side, all the specs to create a component in a cellular network(protocols, procedures, network architecture and so on). are open and free.

On the other hand, the specs that cover all the parts of a cellular system is _many_ thousands of documents - and there's patents hidden in quite a lot of them.

> without much hope of a community reverse engineering a solution.

* specs for the chipsets are not available.

* You might get the spec. for the pinouts for the chips if you sign an NDA, but not the specs for being able to run your own code on it.

* But the chipset manufacturers won't talk to you unless you're serious about buying quite a few million of them anyway.

http://bb.osmocom.org/ have managed to reverse engineer an old GSM chipset (with help from leaked documents and source code) and created an open source GSM base band for those old phones. But there's little to suggest doing the same for 3G or 4G will be possible in the near future.

[ansible]

So it sounds like this comes down to vendors competing [...] I guess this is similar to Nvidia vs AMD (vs Intel I suppose) [...]

Yes, exactly. Sometimes just seeing how something is organized, or the API can give significant clues to how it is done. It is much harder to start from scratch.

Do we have any alternatives? Are there any completely open radio chips in development?

See my parent post. First you need a few billion dollars to buy some spectrum.

[IgorPartola]

> See my parent post. First you need a few billion dollars to buy some spectrum.

So that's the tragedy of the mobile computing revolution isn't it then? That communication tech is technically a free market but realistically is controlled by very few corporations with very deep pockets. I did not realize that this is how it was set up and now I am sad.

[mietek]

Are you aware of Fabrice Bellard's 4G LTE software base station?

http://bellard.org/lte/

[ansible]

I was not aware of this. It is not open-source though, and it is really just for research purposes.

Its actually quite impressive how much they've implemented, though it is still a small fraction of the software you'd need to run an actual cell network.

[mietek]

It's not just for research purposes, as it's sold by Amarisoft as Amari LTE 100:

http://www.amarisoft.com/?p=amarilte

It's also not "they", as it's been developed by a single programmer. Certainly, Bellard is no ordinary programmer, but this should still give some perspective to your claim of the millions of dollars required for development.

[superuser2]

If it's OSS, then users are empowered to modify the code for their own purposes in ways that degrade or deny service to others.

Code could be released for inspection, but you can't be allowed to actually run modified code on real radios outside of RF-isolated testing facilities.

[npsimons]

Ironically, the market seems to be not optimizing for optimal net revenue (income minus costs, where here you're minimizing costs), but for control. This is partly because of the control freak nature of these companies, partly because the government demands it, but also, again ironically, because of long term thinking: if these companies can lock people out and control them, that helps to guarantee future profits. The free market can sometimes be a cruel bitch bent on the end-user's oppression.

[IgorPartola]

Sounds more like the market is stuck at a local profit maximum instead of a global profit maximum. As in, they think they are making as much profit as they can, but in reality if they invested more into something that's not directly consumer facing they'd be end up making more money in the long run. Except this long term thinking is less appealing than the status quo so they just stick with what they know.

[revelation]

I think theres a misunderstanding here. Nobody wants to buy the actual frequency spectrum or compete with carriers; we just want to control the software and processor that does the GSM, 3G and LTE communication, on whatever frequency.

(That is not to say carriers won't do everything in their power to stop actual open source software and hardware implementations; mobile only works because all the devices behave nicely according to the specification, an attacker could with very little power severely compromise the network. There is just a very large barrier to entry, and dumb, bruteforce solutions can be triangulated.)