Open Source Communications and Base Station Equipment

What can you do with a base station?

There’s plenty of fun things you could achieve with such a base station: reverse-engineering of proprietary technology, security research, and probing for vulnerabilities through WWAN interfaces rarely considered as an attack surface. Maybe you could even set up your own cell network — if you ever go sailing in neutral waters, that is.

How many base stations are there in the Interent dataset?

The dataset, provided by Shanghai Telecom, contains more than 7.2 million records of accessing the Interent through 3,233 base stations from 9,481 mobile phones for six months. For example, the following figure shows the distribution of base stations. Each node denotes a base station in Shanghai, China.

Are 2G base stations still useful?

We’ve generally seen 2G base stations over the years, but with the sunset of 2G, those have only been useful in an increasingly low number of countries, and, every once in a while, a hacker camp. Need to debug your DIY network at some point?