Monday, February 10, 2014

Salut, YateBTS!

Today, we are proud to announce the release of YateBTS 1.0, the result of a collaboration between my new company, Legba, Inc, and the good people at Null Team SRL, the home of Yate.

YateBTS is basically the OpenBTS L1 PHY, L2 link layer and L3 radio resource manager, with all other functions implemented in Yate.  This offers some huge advantages over the original OpenBTS SIP interface, including dramatically improved stability, direct support for the all of the protocols already supported by Yate (XMPP/Jabber/Jingle, H.323, MGCP, IAX, ISDN, and others) and lots of other Yate features, like SNMP.  Most notably, though, when YateBTS is used with the commercial version of Yate, it gets the benefit of Yate’s deployed and certified SS7-MAP interfaces, for ready integration into existing mobile infrastructure, including roaming support.

Architecturally, YateBTS is built from a “decapitated” version of the OpenBTS public release, called “MBTS", interfaced to Yate over a socket.  Through this socket, the Yate messaging engine sees abstract “connections” that represent the dedicated radio channels to the mobile stations.  This approach allows Yate and the MBTS component to be licensed independently.  So MBTS inherits the OpenBTS AGPLv3 license and Yate is distributed under either GPLv2 or a commercial binary license, depending on the version.

In the first public release, YateBTS supports GSM-FR calls, SMS and GPRS.  This is a smaller feature set than OpenBTS, but since Yate now allows the control layer to be coded in Javascript, we expect new features to develop very quickly.  (Really; once we decided to build YateBTS it only took a few weeks to get this far.)

I hope everyone has fun with this new toy.

That said, YateBTS is not the main thing we are working on.  More on that later. ;)


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