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datahoarder

Super Pro Member
According to Ofcom, it seems that you can pay a small amount of money (e.g. £80 per year for 2x 3.3MHz band in 1800MHz and 2300MHz) for your private LTE/NR base station.
A low power licence allows users to deploy base stations in a circular area with a 50-metre radius without additional authorisation from Ofcom.

srsRAN 4G on Raspberry Pi 4
 
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According to Ofcom, it seems that you can pay a small amount of money (e.g. £80 per year for 2x 3.3MHz band in 1800MHz and 2300MHz) for your private LTE/NR base station.


srsRAN 4G on Raspberry Pi 4
Yeah I have tried doing research but I've never gotten far in the past, honestly it would be cool to operate a private 4G network (I see @davwheat operates one from his website) but it's hard to find this sort of equipment

I don't think I understand stuff enough to warrant having this kind of thing 😂
 
The idea is you can put a base station up on a tower in the middle of your farm and connect all your machinery, monitoring stations etc. back up to it without having to rely on an e.g. Vodafone network that might not exist, or trying to push Wi-Fi too far.

 
I see @davwheat operates one from his website
I do indeed!

I use a bladeRF xA5 (basically the same as the xA4) and just have it connected up to a server at home. I've also run it from my laptop many times before.

I've never really gotten it working properly, though, which is really annoying. I keep meaning to revisit it but never get enough time to make reasonable progress.

The main annoyance is that NR SA only allows 5 MHz minimum carriers on n3 while the Ofcom license is only 3.3, so you can either try and modify the source code of whatever eNB/gNB solution you use, or you can steal 1.7 MHz paired of EE's spectrum...
 
I do indeed!

I use a bladeRF xA5 (basically the same as the xA4) and just have it connected up to a server at home. I've also run it from my laptop many times before.

I've never really gotten it working properly, though, which is really annoying. I keep meaning to revisit it but never get enough time to make reasonable progress.

The main annoyance is that NR SA only allows 5 MHz minimum carriers on n3 while the Ofcom license is only 3.3, so you can either try and modify the source code of whatever eNB/gNB solution you use, or you can steal 1.7 MHz paired of EE's spectrum...
You could always do n40!

Honestly I wonder how you even connect to it from a phone, since you have to have a SIM card on any network and hope your phone plays along with connecting to it.

Ofcom could always steal some paired frequency from O2 and Vodafone... doubt 5.8MHz is really helpful, just make it 5MHz honestly (and then just move every network's frequency range up by 0.1 lol)
 
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Honestly I wonder how you even connect to it from a phone, since you have to have a SIM card on any network and hope your phone plays along with connecting to it.
You can buy your own "blank" SIM cards and a programmer, which is what I did. You can then set them up however you'd like to work with the private network.

You can't get it working with SIMs from other networks as it needs a secret key (OP/OPc) which is only writeable to the SIM, not readable.
 
You can buy your own "blank" SIM cards and a programmer, which is what I did. You can then set them up however you'd like to work with the private network.

You can't get it working with SIMs from other networks as it needs a secret key (OP/OPc) which is only writeable to the SIM, not readable.
I wonder whether it would be possible to generate eSIMs to connect to private networks

It would be nice tbh if someone writes an actually decent guide from getting from no private network to a fully functioning private network (perhaps that's a future blog entry!)
 
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Actually got my SA network working locally tonight which was amusing.


Untitled.webp
 
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Just noticed this earlier. I'm not sure if it is a private 4G/5G network, I couldn't see any public WiFi networks that would make sense here and it's attached on a security camera at the edge of a retail park but I just wanted someone's opinion on whether they think this might be a private 4G deployment or not?

This is imagery from 6 years ago on Street View, does this suggest a private network to anyone?

Shows a pole for a security camera with two antennas, something that represents a speaker, a sign and a unknown box


I don't want to particularly share the postcode publicly for privacy reasons, but there's definitely no public 4G signal from here afaik
 
Just noticed this earlier. I'm not sure if it is a private 4G/5G network, I couldn't see any public WiFi networks that would make sense here and it's attached on a security camera at the edge of a retail park but I just wanted someone's opinion on whether they think this might be a private 4G deployment or not?

This is imagery from 6 years ago on Street View, does this suggest a private network to anyone?

View attachment 17995

I don't want to particularly share the postcode publicly for privacy reasons, but there's definitely no public 4G signal from here afaik
I should also add that nothing shows up on Cellmapper in my area, they just seem quite similar to phone antennas, I would assume possibly B3 if it is broadcasting anything since it's probably just serving some security cameras?

I might see if I can get anything on 4G when I go pass it next, even if I connect for 5 seconds I should be able to gather information on it. I don't think there's anything like this on other parts of the retail park.

Judging by Street View, these antennas were added sometime between May 2017 and July 2018.
 
I should also add that nothing shows up on Cellmapper in my area, they just seem quite similar to phone antennas, I would assume possibly B3 if it is broadcasting anything since it's probably just serving some security cameras?

I might see if I can get anything on 4G when I go pass it next, even if I connect for 5 seconds I should be able to gather information on it. I don't think there's anything like this on other parts of the retail park.

Judging by Street View, these antennas were added sometime between May 2017 and July 2018.
It might be a PtP or PtMP bridge for connecting the IPCamera.
 
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