Posted: April 23rd, 2014 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Events | No Comments »
Community building at Mobile World Congress
The ability to use open source in creating mobile networks is still a relatively new thing, with a reasonably small but dedicated and, more recently, rapidly growing community. Similarly, it’s still early days when it comes to industry awareness of the opportunities that this presents. And perhaps most excitingly, it is not simply a matter of cost reduction in existing markets; indeed, there are many areas of the world that are not economically viable to serve with proprietary solutions.
With the above in mind Fairwaves decided to host a drinks reception in February at the world’s largest industry event, Mobile World Congress, for those with an interest in open source in mobile telecomms, and community-owned and profitable rural cellular networks.
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Posted: March 20th, 2014 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
The UmTRX project has signed up to become a licensee of the Open Invention Network (OIN), providing it with royalty-free access to a growing patent portfolio that covers the Linux ecosystem and includes numerous mobile technologies.
Access to the defensive portfolio affords the UmTRX project a measure of protection from the actions of patent trolls and those who would seek to attack or undermine the Linux ecosystem. We’re in great company, with founding companies including IBM, Sony and NEC, and licensees ranging from SMEs and smaller open source projects, to global tech giants and major open source projects.
Posted: January 30th, 2014 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
This is a just brief post to introduce a number of updates that we’ve made to the site over the last few months:
We’ve also added an architecture page on the Osmocom wiki with introductory text, and high-level and FPGA diagrams.
There are further updates in the pipeline and we hope to soon complete the migration from the old Google Code project to this site (user information) and the Osmocom wiki (developers).
Posted: November 14th, 2013 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Short for Open source mobile communications, Osmocom is a family of projects that span DECT, GSM, trunked and satellite communication systems, and more — with both software implementations and hardware designs.
Since July of last year the development mailing list for UmTRX has been hosted by Osmocom, but with the documentation remaining at Google Code.
If you’ve visited this website within the last few weeks you may have noticed that we’re in the process of migrating user documentation across from Google Code, and as part of the same process we’re also moving the developer documentation across to a brand new Trac instance that Osmocom have kindly set up for us at umtrx.osmocom.org.
The migration away from Google Code is not complete just yet and improving the user documentation here and the developer docs at Osmocom is very much a work in progress. It should be noted that presently the Google Code issue tracker is still in use, but issues will be moved across to Trac within the next month or so, completing the migration.
Why Osmocom?
Osmocom is more than just somewhere to host a mailing list, wiki and issue tracker, and it is in fact central to our software strategy for UmTRX use with GSM, which involves OpenBSC, OsmoBTS and a number of other projects. Although it’s true that there isn’t a great deal of documentation available on this architecture at present, and addressing this is something that we will be making a priority.
Of course, UmTRX also supports use with OpenBTS and in theory any other GSM implementation which uses the UHD API. However, the combination of UmTRX plus Osmocom (OpenBSC and OsmoBTS etc.) provides a solution that is open from the hardware, all the way up the stack, as opposed to an “open core” solution where certain features are deemed proprietary and reserved for a commercial version of the software.
Posted: October 11th, 2013 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Install | Tags: Fairwaves, GSM, Mexico, Rhizomatica, Yaviche | No Comments »
Two weeks ago and in a collaboration between Fairwaves and Rhizomatica, UmTRX was used to bring mobile communications to the rural village of Yaviche in Mexico.
Arriving late on the evening of Thursday 26th September and after a 5 ½ hour drive, by the end of the following day Fairwaves had installed a GSM network that is now providing up to around 2km coverage, and were able to leave early on the morning of Friday 28th.
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Posted: September 30th, 2013 | Author: Andrew Back | Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »
The UmTRX project has a new website and over the coming months we’ll be adding resources here such as user documentation and how-to guides. However, in the meantime, the primary source of information remains the Google code wiki.
We’ll also be using this blog to provide regular updates from the project, and you can expect posts with technical insights and exploring new features, along with reports from UmTRX use in the field, and posts on wider relevant topics.
To stay up to date you can subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow the project on Twitter, Google Plus or LinkedIn.
