Patents and certification are going to be interesting for this. Building any commercial products or services will put you in the cross hairs of basically anyone with relevant patents. Certification could be an extra hurdle to get to market. Both issues can be fixed with money of course.
What would be interesting would be some company with deep enough pockets to address that backing this.
> Patents and certification are going to be interesting for this.
Are they? Is there any plans to make a commercial product? It doesn't seem like it from the webpage. This project appears to hope to marry several existing projects to build an open source cellular network for researchers and private use, which is not even the first time this is being done. It is being funded via the grant linked below.
> Is there any plans to make a commercial product?
Even if there aren't now - there might be if it becomes easy to make one. Perhaps a town could have its own cell network with decent coverage without requiring larger corporation involvement.
Depends on what that country does in respect to certification. Many countries do a me-too certification where they'll certify something certified by the US or EU.
The hardware is all generic. That leaves the software, and in the EU, software "as such" is not patentable. It would be (is?) a travesty if patents applied regardless, rendering that patent restriction meaningless.
EPO grants them anyway, now if you want to fight the all patents covering 4G, feel free. The Unitary Patent Court will make things worse, as those patent court will have the last word over the "as such" interpretation, without any involvement of the CJEU.
A potential problem with this waiting period is that usable RF spectrum is routinely repurposed (called refarming) from legacy use cases to newer technologies. By the time your patent around a particular kind of radio is expired, the spectrum itself might be nearing the end of its lifetime for that purpose.
An open source network, either regional or wide area, would be a very big deal for many areas. Being 4G compatible is nice, but even if it uses a different band (e.g., less stringently controlled WiFi bands) a mesh network would enable a lot of projects.
On the technical side, current SDRs are cheap and very capable. Unfortunately, for this to take off one needs a large network effect and should the technology take off it is easy for various three letter agencies to compromise, for example by inserting their own nodes. And as some uses are likely to be sketchy "because terrorism/pornography" is all the justification they will need.
- The Pinephone uses a Quectel EG25-G, which is a System on a Module that combines a baseband modem with the necessary RF front-end bits and power needs.
- The Quectel EG25-G itself, uses a Qualcomm chipset (the Qualcomm 9607).
- Qualcomm chipsets in this category tend to have an ARM component and and the actual modem bits which are combination of ARM and Hexagon DSP cores that you talk to over an interface called "QMI."
I'd expect that if Pinephone reached scale (and they hadn't found an alternative) they would just buy the Qualcomm chipsets directly and not have to "free" themselves from Quectel's "integration" that translates between QMI and AT commands (which are miserable) or whatever else Quectel has exposed an an API.
This quirk of modern modems, where you (as a small scale manufacturer) can't buy the chipset itself unless packaged up and marked up by someone like Quectel or Sierra Wireless makes me absolutely livid.
> I'd expect that if Pinephone reached scale (and they hadn't found an alternative) they would just buy the Qualcomm chipsets directly and not have to "free" themselves from Quectel's "integration" that translates between QMI and AT commands (which are miserable) or whatever else Quectel has exposed an an API.
Not really. The USB modem was chosen as it provides isolation from the closed-source blobs that run on the modem. This way, the modem doesn't have access to the main memory. Pine Store Ltd (the commercial entity) being based in china, they certainly could have sourced a SoC integrating a 4G modem, but there's already a zillion devices like that, the idea was to build something compatible with FLOSS from the ground up.
Hmm that's a good point, I had not considered the shared memory architecture of the Qualcomm chipsets.
That said, given that using AT commands usually require enormous amounts of (potentially insecure) string parsing I wouldn't be surprised if there are vulnerabilities to closed source blobs even over USB. That is to say, the reverse engineering on the Android side could improve the security posture (or it could also make it worse!).
What about datasheets that are only available if you're a large enough company to sign a contract and an NDA with Qualcomm?
Also imagine buying a commercially available phone and freeing it from all the TrustZone and code signing bullshit by replacing the SoC with the same chip but in a "development" mode, with no fuses blown.
> you (as a small scale manufacturer) can't buy the chipset itself
If you're willing to deal with possibly questionable Chinese resellers, you can buy pretty much anything you want in small quantities. Just don't expect any support from the manufacturer.
The Pinephones modem is interesting, as it actually has it's own Android OS that is stacked on top of Qualcomm's OS (I want to call it "Hexagon"? But I don't think that's right).
The folks that are freeing the Pinephone modem are focusing on the Android OS, not the underlying firmware.
Code for the large parts of the modem's OS running on the hexagon DSP cores are available on github, if you search long enough. A few mil. lines of code. Not everything though.
Nice, I’ve seen a lot of open stuff out there for building GSM networks, it’s cool to see some more recent stuff as well. I have a limesdr sitting at home I haven’t had the chance to play with much, so I may have to try this out.
I’m not too familiar with cellular networks, but I’ve been curious about 5G networks as well. I wonder how long it will take for us to see similar projects for those.
Well, seeing as 5G is currently a cat diarrhea smoothie, probably a while. It's literally better to just use LTE in most cases. I get the feeling LTE will be around and supported for a long time to come.
Although I don't think it would be possible in countries where frequencies belong to operators, frequencies is a problem for SDR folks if they want to do long range.
I guess cybersecurity agencies would also not be happy with people using this, since it could be used as some form of stingray, I think?
But in africa or other third world countries, I guess there are large areas without internet, so they could obviously benefit from cheaper ways to have internet over there, if it was built for free or funded by some NGO.
I would envision applications like emergency/disaster management, event management, temporary remote network (e.g. desert, mountains), etc. in situations where regular network is down or very crowded.
If the open source community absolutely need a 4G baseband, just crowdfund and buy out Fabrice Bellard's company. The software quality is probably better than anything else out there.
I support F(L)OSS, and this project is wonderful. As a native English speaker, though, I really regret the whole community's collective decision to choose "libre" to refer to software freedom. I understand the etymological origin, but -- to me -- saying "lee bruh" in English is like chewing tinfoil. It strikes me as a tragic failure of marketing.
I seem to remember that one of the names that was rejected in favor of LibreOffice was "Bureau." I wonder how a sleek name like that might have affected the program's fortunes?
As a native French speaker I don't see the problem with the prononciation of libre :)
I understand the arguments for using English as a universal language but in this case the word libre brings an other nuance (meaning) "libre" != "free"
I tend to nitpick in similar ways. However, LibreOffice is used across language boundaries, and words like Free and Open don’t translate as well in my opinion.
I don't understand this comment. The English language already has "libra", "library"... As someone who's fluent in English (but not a native speaker) there is no distinction.
It has to do with the rhythm of the way words are joined. I'm not a linguist, so I don't know the exact right term to use here, but in English there isn't usually that kind of "pause" sound between words/consonants-- whereas, in my limited knowledge of French, it seems like that is quite common (many words seem to end in -re).
I looked it up and it seems I had the wrong pronunciation of "libre". It's pronounced completely different in French, I had no idea. But still, this feels like a non-issue to me. There's nothing wrong with pronouncing "libre" in a way that's more comfortable for English speakers (like Libra), as it would still be crystal clear what you're referring to in my opinion.
I understand it, I think. The shape your lips/mouth make for the 'li' in 'library' is different than for the 'li' in 'libre' (at least when I try to pronounce the latter as french 'libre' but with an English 'r' which I have the impression is how it's supposed to be done and is also what the parent indicates, might be wrong?). As a result there's this weird movement to go from 'lee' to 'br' and I have a hard time getting a typical English 'r' out of it which I have zero problems with in 'library'. Non-native English speaker as well.
What would be interesting would be some company with deep enough pockets to address that backing this.