Facebook is Building an Open Source Wireless Carrier in a Box

The more people connected to the Internet, the more people Facebook makeadvertisings money off of. Though altruism plays a small role, "more ad eyeballs" is the motivation behind Facebook's ongoing attempt to improve broadband connectivity worldwide. As such, Facebook is increasingly exploring a number of alternative connectivity options, including drone broadband, millimeter wave broadband, and even new antenna designs intended to help broaden broadband's reach.

Today Facebook unveiled another key component of its plan: "Open Cellular."

According to a Facebook announcement, Open Cellular is an open source hardware and software platform designed to shore up broadband connectivity to more remote locations. It's effectively a cellular network in a box, totally customizable, and capable of supporting a wide variety of wireless network standards, from 2G and LTE to Wi-Fi access points.

"With OpenCellular, we want to develop affordable new technology that can expand capacity and make it more cost-effective for operators to deploy networks in places where coverage is scarce," Facebook says of the effort. "By open-sourcing the hardware and software designs for this technology, we expect costs to decrease for operators and to make it accessible to new participants."

The idea for an open source, inexpensive and very customizeable cell system was something that was being worked on by Endaga, which Facebook acquired last year. Endaga built its first such network in Papua, Indonesia, in early 2013, with support from USAID and the Blum Center for Developing Economies.

"As of the end of 2015, more than 4 billion people were still not connected to the internet, and 10 percent of the world's population were living outside the range of cellular connectivity," states the announcement. "Despite the widespread global adoption of mobile phones over the last 20 years, the cellular infrastructure required to support basic connectivity and more advanced capabilities like broadband is still unavailable or unaffordable in many parts of the world."

Facebook says the Open Cellular system consists of two basic systems, the General-baseband computing (GBC) system consists of power, housekeeping microcontroller, microprocessor, timing/sync module, sensors, and control mechanism. The other component is a radio with integrated front-end, which Facebook says consists of a software-defined radio (SDR) or system on chip (SoC) that support various open source and commercial cellular stacks.

All of this is housed in an "innovative mounting solution that can handle high winds, extreme temperatures, and rugged climates," the company says. The only component not included in the box? Spectrum, a precious resource that only the world's largest, biggest carriers can afford. Those carriers traditionally have little interest in deploying to more rural markets due to cost, something Facebook's project hopes to address.

Facebook was vague on a timeline for the project, simply stating it's currently testing the system in the labs at Facebook HQ and working with OEM and ODM partners to make the OpenCellular platform widely available. Whether carriers will use it is another matter entirely.

More detail on Facebook's plans can be found here