A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

Look at his ouerve, he doesn't bother integrating any of his projects into anything else, or put more charitably, dance to the politics of other peoples' projects.

I don't blame him. Contributing to GNU projects as an outsider is a PITA.

beagle3• 14 years ago

It's more than that, I think: I've worked with people of his caliber in other fields, and I can appreciate that they need to work at their own pace.

e.g., if he submitted QEMU as a patch for bochs, and it was rejected (for whatever reason), does anyone think his time was better spent fixing that patch?

He produces ingenious, high quality code, and does so at an unbelievable rate (note, none of his open source projects is related to his day job as far as I can tell - except perhaps the ASN 1 compiler).

I think he is arguably optimizing his contribution to society, and I hope he keeps doing that. Let people who can't produce the core do all the integration/politics/detail stuff.

atopuzov• 14 years ago

> Contributing to GNU projects as an outsider is a PITA.

Finally someone who has the guts to write this!!! So true, so true ...

halvsjur• 14 years ago

I was curious if there already existed something like this for GNU Radio and found something called OpenLTE:

http://openlte.sourceforge.net/

claudeshannon3• 14 years ago

Because it probably does not use GNU Radio. Only the NI hardware.

willvarfar• 14 years ago

Very neat. Shame that 'interested companies can contact me'.

Would be fun to know how such base-stations - when attached to antenna - can be used to spoof things and perform attacks. Lets hope that comes up at some blackhat conference soon...

zvikara• 14 years ago

Fabrice has contributed to opensource more than almost anybody here. Absolutely no shame if he prefer to keep the source closed this time.

jeormormont• 14 years ago

I think perhaps you've missed the point of free and open source software.

RachelF• 14 years ago

Yes, it is a big shame that this is not open source.

I wonder how much he plans on making from this?

wr14722• 14 years ago

I hope he makes a shed-load from this. I wouldn't begrudge him any of it, given his contributions to the software community to date.

axusgrad• 14 years ago

Perhaps it is GPL license AND commercial software.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Why shouldn't he make money out of this?

Good developer != ready to work for peanuts.

blinkingled2• 14 years ago

I would not be surprised if his intent is to first make money on his insanely hard and smart work and then make it open source later on. I think he has done something similar with another project of his - I just don't recall which one.

tonfa• 14 years ago

kqemu was originally closed source. Not sure why it was open sourced, competitive advantage went away?

noselasd• 14 years ago

While not LTE, here's GSM stuff:

* http://openbsc.osmocom.org/trac/

* http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Some related videos:

* Fuzzing GSM handsets - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGPOscdLPFQ

* Running your own GSM network - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_9hPRF5fzA

* OpenBSC - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWPom6JIsr4

Here's one building a satelite phone receiver/sniffer:

* http://gmr.osmocom.org/trac/

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSW-V94uZZQ

Open Source GSM protocols (on handsets):

* http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/

mtdev• 14 years ago

Neat, however, software for base station are not provided and interested companies can contact the site owner. Pretty cool that this is allegedly running on a software defined radio kit which can be had for only ~$2000 (a bargain).

bostonvaulter2• 14 years ago

Is there a reason that this Low-Cost software defined radio wouldn't work ($30)?

http://www.amazon.com/Newsky-Receiver-Low-Cost-Software-Defi...

henriks• 14 years ago

receiver only?

bigiain• 14 years ago

It's only a receiver. You'll need a transmit capable radio to do everything this does.

xradionut• 14 years ago

Because you are comparing two different categories of radios. There is a big difference between a very cheap receiver and a high quality, wide bandwidth, customizable transceiver. A bad automobile analogy would be a Yugo vs Peterbilt.

nathell• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is one of the guys I dream of one day achieving the level of productivity of.

trigger• 14 years ago

Productivity and sheer balls. My on-the-side projects are pathetic compared to what this guy does. Even a quick glance at one of those LTE specs is enough to scare me a million miles away from a project like this.

mindjiver3• 14 years ago

Knowing how many people it takes to develop a eNodeB is even more impressive. Normally it would be n * 100 engineers (or even n * 1000) working on these projects.

ssdsa• 14 years ago

Cool, it's from the same author (Fabrice Bellard) who coded the PC emulator in Javascript: http://bellard.org/jslinux/ ("How much time takes your browser to boot Linux?")

sargun• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is to the FLOSS world, as Elon Musk is the entrepreneurship.

marbletiles• 14 years ago

Is it possible to do something similar for 2G/3g?

muzaffarfh• 14 years ago

There is an existing project called OpenBTS, http://wush.net/trac/rangepublic

asg• 14 years ago

I was pleasantly surprised to see the LTE specs are freely available. Large consortium specs of this nature seem to be quite expensive. (cf: http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store.htm)

Wonder what the patent licence situation is with the LTE specs?

mindjiver3• 14 years ago

LTE (as with most 3GPP specs) are heavily patented. All patents are available under FRAND licenses however.

cma3• 14 years ago

Software isn't patentable in the EU, and this is a software radio implementation...

agumonkey5• 14 years ago

The higher the genius, the simpler the webpage.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Bjarne Stroustrup says about this too.

Also have a look at Larry Wall's web page: http://www.wall.org/~larry/

agumonkey5• 14 years ago

My favorite example is http://okmij.org/ftp/

Quite beautiful.

LVB• 14 years ago

Knuth: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/

dchest• 14 years ago

djb: http://cr.yp.to

tobiasu• 14 years ago

Actual hacker news on Hacker News!

przemoc• 14 years ago

So true and so sad! Indeed, pretty rare thing here.

wbhart3• 14 years ago

I like the model Fabrice uses. He picks really meaty, technical projects which most individuals would not attempt alone, if they even think the project is possible. And he comes up with the goods. It would be interesting to know if this model works... umm financially. Very tempting to give it a try if it does.

4bpp• 14 years ago

The reason the average HN-goer never does anything of note is precisely because of being driven by this "how can I monetize this" mentality alone.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

Unfortunately actual hacks are scanty too!

How many people do you know can do all this. There are a few threads being posted these days about side projects/extra income projects/failed ideas. Nearly 99% of all ideas were designing HTML pages. Simple MVC apps.

How many things related to hard core development do you see these days?

Those people who do real hack work, pretty much keep silent and to themselves. Don't harp, tweet or blog every two minutes.

TazeTSchnitzel• 14 years ago

While this stuff is very interesting, websites and software can also be quite interesting feats. Although I would agree many that you see here really aren't.

swalsh• 14 years ago

This is cool, but I would assume he's violating any number of patents in order for it to work properly. (perhaps that's why it's closed source?)

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

I don't think it's the main reason. If he really wanted to open source it he could do it anyway. What can the respective patent holders do? "Bring it on", get bad press, no money (assuming he doesn't make any off this) and Streisand effect.

Assuming he does want to make money off this, it makes sense to hold source (or indeed the whole prototype) closed for many reasons.

noonespecial• 14 years ago

You can't 'hello world' without that being true these days.

cma3• 14 years ago

Software isn't patentable in the EU.

pbhjpbhj3• 14 years ago

You're wrong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Euro....

pbhjpbhj3• 14 years ago

Unless he's using the patented inventions commercially then he's fine. Note that free-gratis distribution can be a commercial use.

pagejim• 14 years ago

Wonder how RealTime it is? Encoding/Decoding of data/signal as per LTE specs is a multi-step process with lots of maths intensive operations.

Normally, custom made Baseband DSP processors are used for this kind of stuff which contain special HW Accelerators for this kind of intensive computing.

Would be really interesting to see how he has implemented it and how practical is it.

jlouis• 14 years ago

Had it been somebody else, I would have pondered on the truth of the claim. But Mr. Bellard... that is another thing entirely.

My guess is that he does have certain limitations, for instance the amount of connections he can manage and so on. But I do think modern hardware can be made to perform well if you know what you are doing. There are many ways to generally implement the DSPs on a modern PC that would be fast enough.

Also, a guess is that one of the reasons DSPs are preferred is that they have a better power profile. You don't need that for testing purposes.

All in all, I think it is a great project.

laclac• 14 years ago

It uses a USRP N210 (https://www.ettus.com/product/details/UN210-KIT) which has an FPGA that is most likely used for the signal processing. However, quite a lot can be done on a standard PC these days with SSE or GPGPU programming.

OllieJones• 14 years ago

Cool! The wall around another walled garden starts to crumble! How many years before the carriers themselves start using open source code in their infrastructure because it's more reliable and robust?

sbierwagen3• 14 years ago

This particular garden has legal walls: 4G radio frequencies are licensed. Transmitting on them without a license can (depending on circumstances) result in jail time.

sp3322• 14 years ago

I wonder if this could easily be combined with the recent hacker cell networks, like ShadyTel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QF4NjbIEbW8#t=64s and NinjaTel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r83PKVXJ_K0

ippisl• 14 years ago

While it's a big technical achievement, in a world when companies are talking about 4G LTE bill of materials of $50 [1] for a picostation(roughly 20mhz) and vodaphone setting targets for $100(my guess for a full device) , where does this fit in ?

[1]http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2010/09/07/picochip-femtocel...

konstruktor• 14 years ago

This aligns very well with the values of hacker culture: learning, exploration and enabling others to do the same.

vidarh• 14 years ago

As a development platform for companies that want to experiment with new features prior to committing to design ASICs to support them, for example.

sp3322• 14 years ago

Maybe just for hackability? http://info.yawp.com/blog/2010/09/open-hardware-thoughts/

mhd3• 14 years ago

Considering that this is from Fabrice Bellard, I actually was quite disappointed that this isn't really software-only, i.e. uses the side effect radio waves generated by some standard hardware to do it. Talk about high expectations…

jwcacces• 14 years ago

Fabrice?

mhd3• 14 years ago

Damn these German sausage fingers!

claudeshannon3• 14 years ago

Not sure what your comment means. Did you want a software EM field?

mhd3• 14 years ago

I was referring to http://bellard.org/dvbt/

Jemm• 14 years ago

As cool as this is, the title is a bit misleading. This setup requires a "low cost software radio frontend" costing about $2000 and the author is using a high end i7 processor.

Still a very cool use of SDR and probably considerably cheaper than the alternatives.

_wp3r• 14 years ago

$2k is exceedingly cheap in the cellular space I would guess. So, the title would only be misleading out of context, in which Fabrice assumes you will find your own context, because he is to busy saving the world with code.

Also agree this is very cool use of SoftRadio.

rsync• 14 years ago

Exactly. Go on ebay and search for "3g base station" or "cdma test" and so on ... low to mid 5-digit price tags for old equipment. Even the iden bases (nextel, etc.) are still fairly expensive...

superuser2• 14 years ago

I thought the frequencies necessary for LTE in the US are licensed exclusively to carriers? Or does LTE tolerate different networks on the same frequency?

claudeshannon3• 14 years ago

You're right. This would be in violation of FCC regulation as it would interfere with a pre-existing network at 2600 MHz.

nolok• 14 years ago

The guys is french living in France for a french company. I doubt he cares about FCC regulations.

a-priori• 14 years ago

They are, which makes the carriers "primary users" of those bands. As an unlicensed user, you may still legally transmit on these bands as long as your transmissions are limited to a small range and do not interfere with a primary user's use.

This means that you must transmit at a low power, but exactly how low depends on the band.

wmf4• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is in France AFAIK (not that it really makes any difference).

Who says the carriers and their suppliers aren't his target customers?

It is also possible to do some experimentation without a license.

kamaal6• 14 years ago

I always think how these hackers manage to do it. If you look at the projects in his homepage they vary across domains.

How do they manage to stay motivated, how do they learn all the stuff they do. And if I'm not wrong they do this apart from their day jobs.

Projects on his page are inspiring.

agumonkey5• 14 years ago

He's a polymath. Smart enough to understand any domain. If not I'd be interested in what subjects he struggles with.

hobbyist4• 14 years ago

No doubt he is a genius, but what has made him excel is discipline. Try to look at the documentation of the tools that he created for this project, you will understand what I mean :)

dicroce• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is one of my programming hero's.

1) FFMPEG 2) TinyCC 3) jslinux

hobbyist4• 14 years ago

As the documentation says, all the processing from physical to protocol layers is done by the PC. Could anyone experienced in wireless technologies explain what is the software radio frontend worth 2000$ actually doing?

wmf4• 14 years ago

A USRP costs almost $2,000 because it is completely general-purpose, modular, and customizable. It's more flexible than you really need, but if you're doing a one-off project it's cheaper than designing a custom radio.

hobbyist4• 14 years ago

so right now the only use of it is to get the raw packets from ethernet, convert to analog with required power and just release it over the metal? I may be wrong here.. not an RF expert

ajays• 14 years ago

I'm clueless about the underlying legalities/politics, so was wondering: could something like this be used to provide connectivity in an area without 4G (but with an Internet connection)? In other words, could I (an average Joe) set up my own "cellular hot spot" and offer a better quality signal to people in the neighborhood?

wmf4• 14 years ago

Basically no. All the spectrum that phones can use is already owned by various companies.

smartkids2• 14 years ago

re: his appeal to "interested corporations"

Does he need money? One would think he probably has a pretty good day job already. But if he really needed it in order to continue writing software, I would bet many people would be willing to contribute to a "Bellard Writing Fund". His contributions to open source are really in a class by themselves.

sbierwagen3• 14 years ago

Individual persons can't deploy their own LTE base stations, unless they've got a couple million in their pocket for the radio frequency licenses. The only way this will be available to the consumer is if a telco produces it.

smartkids2• 14 years ago

Thank you. I knew there must be a reasonable explanation.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard is a genius. Seriously, this guy may just be one of the, if not the best software developers around. The very fact Bellard seems to like tackling heavily technical challenges and sharing his findings is why he's the great developer he is. This is impressive.

kragen• 14 years ago

While I agree, he hasn't shared his findings in this case yet.

swah• 14 years ago

He'd only have to write a web framework to ruin his reputation!

st3fan• 14 years ago

This would be more interesting if it were an open source project.

hobbyist4• 14 years ago

I have a question here.. No one doubts the genius of fabrice bellard.. Someone in the thread rightly commented him as a polymath.. Fabrice sticks to C and loves the language to the core.. I often hear the FP folks saying that ppl who are inclined towards math love to program in lisp/scheme/haskell/clojure.. Fabrice Bellard being a math genius has no project written in any of these languages.. Why so? I understand it is personal taste but there got to be deep reason also

marshray2• 14 years ago

Several of his projects show he has an affection for applied number crunching and low-level programming. C lives right at the intersection of these domains.

peterhajas• 14 years ago

Fabrice Bellard does it again.

A 4G LTE base station running entirely in software on a standard PC

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