In February Facebook announced they’d open sourced their Magma project,

Magma provides a software-centric distributed mobile packet core and tools for automating network management.

Open-sourcing Magma to extend mobile networks

Magma’s modular software based architecture means you can scale up extra resources as needed, with no need to have physical hardware to run your EPC.

(Cisco’s Ultra Packet Core does have a virtualisation option, but it’s not cheap)

I got pretty excited by this, so I’ve ordered myself an eNodeB (Just a Picocell), a pile of USIMs, programmer and started installing an environment.

In the past I’ve used srsEPC and NextEPC and software-defined radio hardware (BladeRF) to run LTE stuff, so I’m looking forward to seeing if I can implement parts of them into Magma, and also eventually use Kamailio’s IMS modules to implement an IMS core and run VoLTE.

So let’s install Magma, explore it and lurk on the Discord, all while we kill time waiting for hardware to arrive!