We are a company of long time open source advocates, it’s in our DNA and it enables us to build solutions which are virtually impossible to beat in terms of cost and flexibility. Over the years we’ve made countless contributions to numerous key open source telecommunications projects, and below you can find details of some of those which are at the cornerstone of Fairwaves solutions.
UmTRX is the name of our SDR transceiver. At the same time this is an Open Source project, part of the Osmocom family of open source projects, and is also a partner project of Myriad-RF. As such it benefits from being part of an ever-growing ecosystem of complementary hardware and software for mobile communications and more.
Osmocom is a family of projects that develop open source mobile communications technology. Within this the OpenBSC project serves as an umbrella for GSM infrastructure software, having developed BSC/”network-in-the-box”, BTS and TRX implementations, among others. The Osmocom GSM stack is a key part of the Fairwaves architecture, we are regular contributors and it is fully supported as part of our solutions. Indeed, the UmTRX hardware platform is also an Osmocom project.
When we started out Fairwaves solutions initially used the OpenBTS GSM implementation, but after extensive testing we have found the Osmocom GSM stack to be far more robust and flexible, and in addition to which it follows a true open source development model that benefits from much greater transparency and wider participation. However, our equipment is compatible with OpenBTS and we would like to acknowledge the fact that it was the very first open source GSM implementation.
Myriad RF is a family of open source hardware projects for wireless communications, and a community that is working to make wireless innovation accessible to as many people as possible. Fairwaves have worked very closely with the initiative and while the UmTRX project is developed primarily through Osmocom, it also has the status of an Associate Project within Myriad-RF.
