Comba Telecom Helps Bring Open RAN to New Markets

Comba Telecom is a global leading wireless solutions provider with their own R&D facilities, manufacturing base, and sales and service teams. The company offers a comprehensive suite of products and services including wireless access, wireless enhancement, antenna and subsystems and wireless transmission to its global customers. Comba's core product portfolio includes antennas and subsystems and network products (DAS, Small Cells, Repeater, RRU, etc.), offering turnkey solutions for indoor and outdoor 2G/3G/4G/Wifi/5G to their global customers.

Last year, Comba announced the launch of the industry's first Open RAN multi-RAT, multi-band Remote Radio Unit (“RRU”) that supports 1800MHz and 2100MHz, promoting widespread adoption of emerging open standards in the globe. The announcement says:

The RRU is designed to minimize the total cost of ownership (“TCO”) for operators and neutral hosts in macro deployments through fast and easy deployment, energy savings, improved coverage and throughput, smaller footprint and easy maintenance. Engineered for efficient high power (320W) operation, the multi-RAT multi-band 4T4R RRU minimizes the environmental footprint and reduces the energy spend for the operator. 

As a first in the Open RAN industry the GSM/UMTS/LTE/5G NR multi-mode operation makes it ideal for simple upgrades of legacy sites without compromises. The 4T4R radio supports two LTE/5G NR carriers per band and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing (“DSS”). This enables operators to serve arising 5G traffic demand without additional spectrum or removing LTE service.

Comba has a long-standing collaboration with major industry partners and alliances and has participated in the initial Open RAN trials and lab projects in different regions. With all in-house expertise in interoperability and optimizing radio designs for market specific criteria, Comba enables mobile operators to accelerate time to market, and mitigate the overall technology risk when adopting to Open RAN strategy in their next generation of RAN. 

A recent video looks at these Open RAN Multi-band RRUs

While most Open RAN RUs are focused on 4G & 5G, Comba's radios work on 2G & 3G as well. This has allowed them to bring Open RAN solutions to many different parts of the world that may not be ready for 5G yet. Some of these include announcements with their software partner Parallel Wireless in Latin America and Indonesia. Another recent standalone announcement included one with Turkcell in Turkey.

Telefonica also listed them as one of the partners in a presentation at MWC

Operator Watch Blog: Telefonica's Vision of Open RAN from MWC 2022 - https://t.co/iTYJDGx1MQ via Maite Aparicio, Head of Open RAN-Global CTIO#3G4G5G #OperatorWatch #4G #5G #Telefonica #OpenRAN #ORAN #ORANalliance #NEC #Altiostar #Intel #Comba #Airspan #SuperMicro #Dell #RedHat pic.twitter.com/pE4OpsRTmD

— 3G4G (@3g4gUK) April 6, 2022

Telecom Infra Project's TIP Exchange features quite a few radios from Comba which you can see here.

If you are interested in learning more, what the Comba keynote and Panel Discussion on Maturity of Open RAN Adoption at MWC22 Open RAN Summit below:

Related Posts:

• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Vodafone Portugal's “streetlamp”
• Operator Watch Blog: Telefonica's Vision of Open RAN from MWC 2022
• The 3G4G Blog: Open RAN Terminology and Players
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: Open RAN (O-RAN) RRU (O-RU) and DU (O-DU) Design
• The 3G4G Blog: A quick tutorial on Open RAN, vRAN & White Box RAN
• The 3G4G Blog: Open RAN Explanation, Videos, White papers and Other Resources
• The 3G4G Blog: O-RAN Introduction for Beginners
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NTT Docomo's 5G Network is based on 'Open RAN' Principles
• Telecoms Infrastructure Blog: NTT Docomo's 5G RAN Infrastructure
• The 3G4G Blog: 5G RAN Functional Splits
• The 3G4G Blog: From traditional RAN to Open RAN - O-RAN: Goals and Challenges
• 3G4G: Open RAN, OpenRAN and O-RAN 

4G LTE Man In The Middle Attacks With A Hacked Small Cells

Here is an interesting talk from recent HITBSecConf by Xiaodong Zou. HITBSecConf or the Hack In The Box Security Conference is an annual must attend event in the calendars of security researchers and professionals around the world. Held annually in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Amsterdam in The Netherlands, HITBSecConf is a platform for the discussion and dissemination of next generation computer security issues.

From the talk narrative:

Femtocells offer a user the ability to have a small base station located within their house or other area. These small base stations provide access to the core telecom network where poor reception from an eNodeB would normally prevent consistent coverage. Femtocells has been standardized in LTE since release 8, and is referred as Home eNodeB, or HeNB. HeNBs are mandated to have an IPsec connection back to a security gateway (SeGW) to protect traffic flowing into and out of a Mobile Network Operator (MNO)’s core network.

If the HeNB is within the physical possession of an attacker, this provides unlimited time to identify a flaw on the HeNB. A compromised HeNB can be used in a manner similar to a rogue base station, but will also provide the attacker access to clear text traffic before it is sent back to the core network. There are more than ten different types of HeNBs deployed in China. Ericsson ENC-nRBS01B40 is one of them – a TD-LTE base station working on band B40.

In this talk, we will cover:

1.) How to root a 4G LTE femtocell.
2.) How to make the femtocell portable.
3.) How to perform man-in-the-middle attack with the femtocell.
4.) Show the prototype of Hacking Box of S1 Interface (HBoS)

Slides and video embedded below:

4G LTE Man in the Middle Attack with a Hacked Femtocell from 3G4G

Related Posts:

• Macrocells, Small Cells & Hetnets Tutorial
• Introduction to 3GPP Security in Mobile Cellular Networks

Vodafone Portugal's “streetlamp”

Vodafone Portugal, in partnership with Drivetel, Omniflow and Amop is deploying its own “streetlamp” to improve coverage and capacity in certain areas while at the same time making sure the antennas blend in with the surroundings.

From Linkedin (via Cliff Velosa):

In Portugal Vodafone is committed on reducing visual impact on outdoor (rural and urban) coverage and made sure that the energy resource consumption is engage to a better and efficient way.

Comba Telecom has played an important role together with Drivetel S.A to the construction of a clean and unique system with a camouflaged Tri-Sector antenna that supports LTE1800 and WCDMA coverage and fits just perfectly to the rest of the environment.

A smart street light 100% self-powered by Wind and Solar energy and supported by a local Portuguese Company called OmniFlow.

It’s a completely integrated solution that blends into the most modern urban Smart Cities and to the wildest landscape. The generated energy with natural resources can contribuite to Vodafone's Pico/Micro/Small cell NB/eNB Base stations energy supply that is environmental friendly and contributes to the local population not only on mobile coverage and services but also served as public lights during the night.

The infrastructure is all underground with only the antennas on the top.

In another Linkedin post (via Cliff Velosa):

One of Portugal’s sea viewpoint – Santa Cruz beach, the local municipality together with Vodafone agreed on a efficient way to supply mobile radio coverage and capacity on Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G with an independent lighting system which produces enough electricity for the lighting system throughout the night by using natural resources (wind and sun), saving extra costs on the municipality, the tax payers will thank them in the long term.

A local Portuguese company did the design of the base bench foundation in concrete that meets the concerns of vandal resistance, life cycle and with reserved space to add all the RF RRU's/BBU's inside a the cabinet and with a spot around the tower to sit and navigate on Vodafone’s high speed broadband. No more ugly towers with massive antennas, Comba's Camouflaged 3 Cluster antenna did just the trick to reduce that impact.

This new “streetlamp” reduces the time to setup the tower and offering radio service to Vodafone's customers in matter of hours knowing that everything is setup by Drivetel in advance before transporting the system to the field.

All picture sources: Cliff Velosa

Further Reading:

• Road Surveillance without grid power or network coverage?
• Amop - Urban
• Banco Candeeiro Inteligente+Omniled+Wifi [PDF]