The lucky receivers of a free nano3G femto cell sponsored by sysmocom have been contacted.
The selected projects will be documented at the [[cellular infrastructure:accelerate3g5|accelerate3g5 wiki page]].
If your project has been selected, kindly follow the instructions found there and mark the start of your project.
We are glad to have reached many new community members and are looking forward to seeing your projects evolve.
Here is a huge Thank You to all contestants from the Osmocom community and the sysmocom team!
The OsmoCon 2017 is the first technical conference for Osmocom users, operators and
developers and will be held on April 21st, 2017 in Berlin, with kind organizational
support by sysmocom s.f.m.c. GmbH.
For the first time ever, the Osmocom Conference brings together users, operators
and developers of the Osmocom Open Source cellular infrastructure projects, such as
OsmoBTS, OsmoBSC, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN and others.
Join us for a day of presentations and discussions with the main developers behind
Open Source Mobile Communications, as well as commercial and non-profit users of
the Osmocom cellular infrastructure software.
Read more on our OsmoCon 2017 wiki page
We are glad to announce that sysmocom extends the invitation to join the Accelerate 3.5G project by two weeks. Send your project proposals to apply for one of 50 free ip.access nano3G femto cells.
Osmocom's support for 2G/GSM is mature and widespread. Since 2016, we're taking
on the next level: 3G/3.5G. The key to running your own 3G network is to obtain
actual 3G cell hardware -- here is an exciting opportunity to get started:
No less than 50 femtocells will be given away for free by sysmocom, one of the
main drivers of the Osmocom project. To receive a free 3G femtocell, tell
sysmocom how you will help the Osmocom project drive 3.5G forward if you had
one, before the end of January 2017. This marks the launch of the 3.5G
Acceleration Project, backed by the Osmocom community. Join us!
Find further details on the 3.5G Acceleration Project and receiving your own 3G
femtocell for free at https://sysmocom.de/downloads/accelerate_3g5_cfp.pdf.
Harald Welte will deliver workshop on Running your own cellular network using OpenBSC & Co at the Electromagnetic Field Camp.
The workshop is currently scheduled at Saturday August 6th at 10:00 AM in Workshop 2
More information can be found at https://www.emfcamp.org/line-up/2016/183
Back in May, Osmocom developer Max Suraev has been working on implementing both uplink and downlink DTX support in the Osmocom GSM stack, most notably OsmoBTS and the OpenbSC libbsc (OsmoBSC and OsmoNITB).
The purpose of uplink DTX is to
- reduce uplink interference with other (remote) cells on the same ARFCNs
- conserve battery power in the mobile station (lower transmit duty cycle)
The purpose of downlink DTX is to
- reduce power consumption and heat dissipation on the BTS
- reduce downlink interference with other (remote) cells on the same ARFCNs
Downlink DTX is only permitted on secondary trnansceivers, i.e. on those TRX that do not carry the FCCH/SCH/BCCH beacon.
All related patches to OsmoBTS and OpenBSC have meanwhile been merged. You can use the dtx uplink [force] and dtx downlink VTY commands at the BTS node to enable the features.
The classic ETSI/3GPP specifications about GSM, particularly those related to A-bis, assume a fairly static allocation of the timeslots of a TRX inside a BTS. This means that the administrator configures each timeslot in the BSC to be one of the permitted channel combinations, for user traffic that's either SDCCH, TCH/F, TCH/H or PDCH.
The Osmocom project software, including OsmoBSC, OsmoNITB, OsmoBTS and OsmoPCU followed this static timeslot allocation when first implementing the related standards and systems.
This static allocation, particularly between circuit-switched calls and packet data leads to sub-optimal use of available (scarce) resources. What if there are no voice calls, but a high demand for packet data? Or why not (as an operator policy) provide more voice channels on demand, at the expense of packet data?
In 2013 years, Osmocom developer Andreas Eversberg did a BSC-side implementation of dynamic PDCH switching in OsmoNITB. However, related code unfortunately never made it to Osmocom master and it exposed some bit-rot over the years.
Neels Hofmeyr has recently picked up those patches, extended, fixed and forward-ported them to current master. They were subsequently merged. Corresponding changes inside OsmoBTS have been made with osmo-bts-sysmo and osmo-bts-litecell15, and have also been merged. Implementation for osmo-bts-trx is still ongoing (but difficult due to the desolate state of osmo-bts-trx with lack of a current maintainer).
With this first series of changes, only switching between TCH/F and PDCH is possible. Neels is currently working on making TCH/F, TCH/H and PDCH dynamic, resulting in even more flexibility even among full-rate and half-rate voice channels.
Over the past weeks, Osmocom developer Daniel Willmann has been working on various improvements/extensions of the popular wireshark dissector in the context of using it with (Osmocom) GSM networks.
The extensions include:
- support for playback of AMR from captured RTP streams (using libopencore-amrnb)
- extend RTP jitter/delay statistics for AMR-RTP as used in A-bis/IP and A/IP
- a new dissector for the Osmux (Osmocom Multiplex) protocol
- statistics support for the Osmux protocol.
The above features allow for much better analysis of any voice plane related issues in Osmocom GSM networks.
All related changes can be found in https://gitea.osmocom.org/osmocom/wireshark/src/branch/daniel/osmux and we are actively submitting them to mainline wireshark at this point.
The Osmocom project has migrated from an aging infrastructure consisting of multiple trac instances to a new environment using redmine.
Using redmine allows us to create a comprehensive hierarchy of nested projects, and allows projects to be shifted around in that hierarchy after the fact, as well as cross-project issue (=ticket) relationships. This fits our development much better than what we had before.
Over the past five weeks, the content of the affected was imported and manually reviewed/edited/migrated. You may still find some pages with erroneous formatting or other issues. If you do, please consider registering an account and fixing it yourself, or notifying the respective project mailing list (openbsc@lists.osmocom.org in case of doubt) about the issue you've encountered.
Specifically, this includes the old sites:
More details can be found in Harald's blog post at http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20160221-osmocom-redmine/
Yesterday the Osmocom project founder Harald Welte presented about Open Source Network Elements for Security Analysis of Mobile Networks at the Troopers 2016 TelcoSecDay.
The main topics addressed by this presentation are:
- Importance of Free and Open Source Software implementations of cellular network protocol stacks / interfaces / network elements for applied telecom security research
- The progress we've made at Osmocom over the last eight years.
- An overview about our current efforts to implement at 3G Network similar to the existing 2G/2.5G/2.75G implementations.
There are no audio or video recordings of this session.
Slides are available at http://git.gnumonks.org/index.html/laforge-slides/plain/2016/telcosecday/foss-gsm.html
