Last year Jacob and me worked on the osmo-sgsn of OpenBSC. We have improved the stability and reliability of the system and moved it to the next level. By adding the GSUP interface we are able to connect it to our commercial grade Smalltalk MAP stack and use it in the real world production GSM network. While working and manually testing this stack we have not used our osmo-pcu software but another proprietary IP based BTS, after all we didn’t want to debug the PCU issues right now.

This year Jacob has taken over as a maintainer of the osmo-pcu, he started with a frequent crash fix (which was introduced due us understanding the specification on TBF re-use better but not the code), he has spent hours and hours reading the specification, studied the log output and has fixed defect after defect and then moved to features. We have tried the software at this years Camp and fixed another round of reliability issues.

Some weeks ago I noticed that the proprietary IP based BTS has been moved from the desk into the shelf. In contrast to the proprietary BTS, issues has a real possibility to be resolved. It might take a long time, it might take one paying another entity to do it but in the end your system will run better. Free Software allows you to genuinely own and use the hardware you have bought!