Creating a CDMA or GSM LAN?

Question

I am developing several different mobile applications for several mobile devices, and I want to quickly test them in a local development environment. I was wondering if it is possible (with some equipment) to set up a local desktop CDMA / GSM base station to test devices through a local personal cellular network. The range should not be very far. An alternative is to purchase SIM cards and plans for various operators, but not all types of operators / networks are available in our area.

I'm sure I saw some kind of desktop device that will allow you to configure local area networks for development / testing purposes, but it seems that it cannot find it.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The least expensive device I know of is the Agilent 8960 . It is difficult to give an exact price, since it depends on the options you have chosen, but you will most likely have to drop about $ 30,000 or more for a new one.

GSM, GPRS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSPA, CDMA 2000, 1x, EV-DO are supported, although a box with all these parameters in it will be much higher than the figure above!

The device has been working for a while, so you can find something on eBay or through surplus sales, etc.

The potential is that it gives you tremendous control over your cellular environment and allows you to perform repeated bandwidth tests (which is really not possible on live networks unless you use statistical methods and many, many test runs), but the obvious drawback is price!

Answer 2

In the standard network setup, you will need an antenna, BTS, BSC, MSC, GGSN and SGSN to work with data traffic, everything is terribly expensive and requires expert knowledge to run and work.

If you're interested in experimenting, try OpenBSC , although it can be difficult to find BTS hardware.

If you want to buy current products, see IPaccess . They offer equipment for picocell. I am not sure if their BSC can work without MSC and SGSN. But still expect a 5-digit price. Tecore is also worth a visit.

Test equipment manufacturers may be an alternative. There you should check if you can really fork data traffic on the Internet or on some test server if you need it.

If you want to do this for life, and not for pleasure, I would suggest that just buying SIM cards plus data plans is the cheapest alternative.

Answer 3

You can deploy your own cellular network! from http://openbts.org/ , but you need a development kit (Hardware) that is a little expensive. Or you can try to hack your own phone to use it as a radio, which is really complicated but cheap.

Answer 4

The answer to this question may also interest you, depending on what your application does:

Mobile Website Testing

In fact, there are companies offering a kind of virtual testing service that allows you to test phones with different locations and combinations of operators.