Open source 5G core network base on 3GPP R15
Looking at this code, and more broadly speaking the cellular telephony ecosystem as a whole, the best way to articulate what I feel is to point at GNS3, the network simulator.<p>GNS3 is honestly insane. It lets me run virtualized instances of the software stacks hiding inside 6..8-figure (!!) network equipment and then route packets between stuff in exactly the same way I would get if I had the physical equipment.<p>But I personally find absolutely no substitute (as I get started&#x2F;oriented) to being able to plonk a switch on a workbench and reason about it in a tactile manner.<p>I think the same argument might be made about flight simulation: to a point, a flight simulator has nothing on just getting in a plane and flying around.<p>In both cases, a) it&#x27;s entirely reasonable to do without &quot;the real thing&quot; and still figure things out, and b) simulation is an such an exceedingly useful drilling and training aid that the industry as a whole would be missing something measurable without it.<p>But it still remains that establishing a correctly calibrated fundamental sense of how everything works and how stuff gets done can be harder when using a simulator. Things might not intuitively click right away. Mental models might be a bit (or a lot) more fragmented. Complex concepts might require more juggling and mental effort to integrate and understand.<p>So you can kind of see my frustration: I&#x27;m extremely interested in wireless communications in general (just broadly speaking) so being able to stare at all this code is awesome... with the caveat emptor that <i>I can&#x27;t legally do anything with it in the real world</i>. The revolution of software-defined radio might mean the physical baseband aspect of 3G&#x2F;4G&#x2F;5G is more accessible than ever - a couple thousand now (if that, I think) instead of 5+ figures - but the relevant spectra are still licensed and locked down tight pretty much worldwide, and that&#x27;s not likely to change anytime in the long term.<p>Unlike the &quot;I&#x27;ll probably never see one of these in person&quot; kit that I&#x27;m content to look at pictures of and tinker with in GNS3 :) wireless networking&#x2F;communications does (at least to me) largely lend itself to being a very tactile subject that you just <i>want</i> to play with in the real world.<p>LoRaWAN is very low bitrate and (to a cursory&#x2F;long distance understanding) has a bit of friction around patents&#x2F;licensing (although if I can buy premade modules that Just Work™ I&#x27;m happy)<p>Long-range Wi-Fi is... not really an explicitly supported configuration because it gets right up at the edge of legal transmit power limits.<p>Wi-MAX... I honestly don&#x27;t get. I can&#x27;t tell where it sits on the relevance spectrum. I remember reading about it years ago but it&#x27;s like it disappeared at some point.<p>Ham radio cannot be encrypted and thus represents a step down in terms of present status quo expectations on the public Internet.<p>I&#x27;m incidentally curious how DJI&#x27;s drones can get 10km line of sight. I wonder what transmit power and band(s) they&#x27;re using to manage that (ISM 2.4GHz&#x2F;5.8GHz?). Presumably the video transmission architecture is an eye-glaze-inducing highly specialized proprietary mess that&#x27;s reasonably micro-optimized to the hilt (?).<p>With the above in mind, is there anything up-and-coming, obscure or whatnot that I (very probably) don&#x27;t know about in the space?<p>And flipping the entire problem domain around, how <i>can</i> I get interested in the open source work being done in the cellular space? What interesting things can I do without any sort of base station equipment? And to what extent <i>can</i> I play around with cellular-band RF if I were to go shopping?