We were very fortunate to have a presentation at the BT / EE & Lime Micro hackathon on the Open Source Mobile Communications (Osmocom) project. For those not in the know, this is an umbrella for a family of open source projects that implement support for GSM, GPRS, and 3G cellular systems, along with TETRA, GMR, and others. The project’s roots can be traced back to around 2008 and with many collaborators serves as a model for open source development.

Osmocom 2G and 2.5G technology has been deployed as part of marine cellular solutions and used to provide community-operated networks in rural Mexico and Africa, amongst many other uses. It is at the heart of the OpenCellular project, which is run as part of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP) led by Facebook. Full support for LimeSDR and LimeNET hardware is in the pipeline.

Founders of the Osmocom project went on to establish sysmocom, a company that since 2011 has been providing products and consultancy services based around the technology stack. In the presentation, sysmocom’s Daniel Willmann takes us through the history of the project, software architecture, hardware support, and just a few of the possible use cases.

Andrew and the LimeNET Team