Open Source Telecommunications

Open Source Telecommunications can be a reality today.

In emerging the markets like India, the need of the hour is to create an environment for inclusive growth.

Since much of India lives in small towns and villages, and also a low ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) is expected. A low cost telecommunications is needed for rural India.

An end-to-end open source telecom will reduce the price. And, also it can foster a support and development community that will help maintaining the telecoms network operations.

Aim

To create an end-to-end standards based open source reference implementation that can inter-operate and co-exist with commercial standards based products.

Standards

ITU (International Telecommunication Union) is the mother standards body in telecoms. However, post 2G, the leadership position shifted to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute). The 3G standards was handed over to 3GPP, which has recently (11 December 08) completed 3G LTE (long Term Evolution) standards.

Other standards bodies that have significant influence are Parlay, TMForum (NGOSS, eTOM) and OMA.

IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) an all IP (Internet Protocol) leverages IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force).

The overall LTE (Long Term Evolution) Architecture is described in 3GPP TS 23.002 version 8.5.0 Release 8. This is a MUST READ SPECS.

3GPP protocol has a mapping with IETF.