The Cloud Based 5GC – From Theory To Practice

Last year I wrote about a 5G Americas whitepaper that describes how 3GPP has standardized the 5G core in a way that lends itself for cloud based implementation. In short, that means that control plane functions are split into microservices, deployed on bare metal clusters in containers and managed with Kubernetes. So far the theory. … Continue reading The Cloud Based 5GC – From Theory To Practice

The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 3 – Local Breakout

Ever since GPRS came around the corner one and a half decades ago there’s been this concept of international roaming with ‘local breakout’ in which IP packets of roaming subscribers are sent directly to the Internet from the visited network. Sounds nice but in practice, it’s not really used. Instead, the current approach is referred … Continue reading The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 3 – Local Breakout

The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 2 – Identifiers

In part one of this mini-series on the 5G core network I’ve taken a look at some of the new concepts and how the network entities there with their new names map to what we already know from the EPC, i.e. the 4G core network. Now that this is done let’s have a look at … Continue reading The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 2 – Identifiers

Raspberry Pi With Remote Screen Sharing – A Quick Installation Guide

It’s been a while since I installed a headless Raspberry Pi from scratch with a desktop GUI to be accessed over the network. In the ‘early days’ of the Pi this used to be very simple: Get an image file from the Raspbian website, use ‘dd’ on Linux to copy the image to an SD … Continue reading Raspberry Pi With Remote Screen Sharing – A Quick Installation Guide

The Three Eras Of Telecom Infrastructure Hardware

As you might have noticed on the blog, I’ve been doing a lot of hands-on exploration these days of bare metal hardware, virtual machines, containers and orchestration (e.g. Kubernetes). My motivation behind this is twofold. For one thing, I like to evolve my private cloud. Current status: 25 containers are now running in my private … Continue reading The Three Eras Of Telecom Infrastructure Hardware