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A comment on YC Research. Parent comment

Re:YC Research by rsync on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @03:39PM (#10348478)
"For now they are going to be hand-selected by me (the area we are starting with requires pretty specific domain expertise). Not sure what we'll do in the future."

Two words: baseband processor.

The world really, really needs a fully open baseband processor.

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Re:YC Research by tlb on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @05:02PM (#10349077)
It really does. But that seems like a mission for a startup, not a research organization. The challenges are more engineering and business than science.

If someone wants to apply with an open baseband processor startup, applications are due Oct 13!

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Re:YC Research by cambion on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:32PM (#10348863)
It's true that we need an open baseband processor, but I wonder if this qualifies as the sort of blue-sky research that I'm guessing they'll want to focus on?

My feeling is that the software to accomplish this is already largely there, but the hard part of getting a design to the fab and actually getting anyone to adopt it isn't.

I think there would also be a number of regulatory hurdles to cross, since this would end up being essentially an SDR, and the FCC (for example) already seems to fear wide public availability for those.

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Re:YC Research by Natsu on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @04:59PM (#10349054)
They only care if you can make it work on channels it shouldn't, they don't care whether the code that controls it is open or not.

But yes, an open processor could help with a lot of open networking problems, even though it seems more like an engineering matter than research per se.

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Re:YC Research by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday October 07, 2015 @06:42PM (#10349643)
I thought the issue there was primarily legal, not technical.

We have OsmocomBB, but it's limited to the 2G standard and comes with a ton of usage caveats pertaining to regulatory compliance and legality.

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