Getting Started with OpenBTS

Introduction

Telephones are cool. Yes, smartphones are cool, too, but I’m talking about plain old two-wire, curly corded telephones. The ability to transmit your voice between any two points on Earth is an amazing human accomplishment.

Perhaps even more amazing is how quickly this accomplishment has been taken for granted. Monumental efforts were undertaken over the past 100 years to build the public switched telephone network. Webs of copper were hung and buried. Long distance lines between cities and then towns were laid. Humans manually routed and connected calls, then analog machines and finally digital computers did that automatically. Along the way, mobile networks were invented and deployed. The same infrastructure story took place as technologies advanced: equipment was upgraded, mobile phones repeatedly replaced.

Now, with both wired and wireless telephony networks delivering voice service solidly for decades, the next upgrade cycle is under way for data bandwidth: fiber optic to your home and LTE to your smartphone.

OpenBTS bridges these two worlds. By converting between the wireless radio interface and open IP protocols, it allows anyone with IP connectivity to deploy a mobile network.

Many places on Earth still do not have home telephone lines or mobile network reception. But, more often than not, they do have an Internet connection via satellite or long-haul WiFi. Properly integrated, OpenBTS can convert and distribute this Internet connection as a mobile network across ...