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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Patents and certification are going to be interesting for this. Building any commercial products or services will put you in the cross hairs of basically anyone with relevant patents. Certification could be an extra hurdle to get to market. Both issues can be fixed with money of course.

What would be interesting would be some company with deep enough pockets to address that backing this.

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> Patents and certification are going to be interesting for this.

Are they? Is there any plans to make a commercial product? It doesn't seem like it from the webpage. This project appears to hope to marry several existing projects to build an open source cellular network for researchers and private use, which is not even the first time this is being done. It is being funded via the grant linked below.

https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/825310

> Is there any plans to make a commercial product?

Even if there aren't now - there might be if it becomes easy to make one. Perhaps a town could have its own cell network with decent coverage without requiring larger corporation involvement.

Would this still be a problem in a country where software patents are not recognized?

Depends on what that country does in respect to certification. Many countries do a me-too certification where they'll certify something certified by the US or EU.

The hardware is all generic. That leaves the software, and in the EU, software "as such" is not patentable. It would be (is?) a travesty if patents applied regardless, rendering that patent restriction meaningless.

EPO grants them anyway, now if you want to fight the all patents covering 4G, feel free. The Unitary Patent Court will make things worse, as those patent court will have the last word over the "as such" interpretation, without any involvement of the CJEU.

As I said, a travesty.

That isn't really going to make a difference. The patents involved in cellular networking extend significantly into hardware.

My point is that this project reimplements most of that hardware stuff in software, thus not physically infringing.

I assume patents will expire eventually. It will be nice to be prepared when they do.

A potential problem with this waiting period is that usable RF spectrum is routinely repurposed (called refarming) from legacy use cases to newer technologies. By the time your patent around a particular kind of radio is expired, the spectrum itself might be nearing the end of its lifetime for that purpose.

When they expire they will no longer be useful. You will need new patents to operate 100G networks.

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