Digital connectivity continues to accelerate across the world with over 3.8 billion people now using mobile internet. But 3.4 billion more live in areas with network coverage – yet still have no access to digital services. In fact, the usage gap is now six times larger than the coverage gap. Factors like cost, technology, awareness, and many more are widening that gap.
Packet cores are fundamental to a mobile network and a lot of innovation in the telecom industry is focused on making the packet cores efficient, open and cost effective. This in turn democratizes the access to mobile networks and their builders to new regions and subscribers. This innovation is the right step towards closing the digital divide gap.
Magma, a Linux Foundation project, is an open-source cloud-native platform designed to simplify deployment and management of core network functions across locations spanning the communications infrastructure edge. Magma’s goal is to bring advanced packet core technology to the masses at a lower total cost of ownership to MNOs, ISPs, MSOs, and enterprises that need to launch services such as mobile broadband, fixed wireless access, private LTE, and 5G.
As a founding member of Magma, today Arm is proud to announce the general availability of Magma 1.8 and official support for Arm port for the project. Arm’s role in this journey is to make it as easy as possible to create solutions that are accessible to a broad userbase from cloud to edge to endpoint devices. To do that, we remain committed to open-standards and platform diversity for wherever computing happens.
With 1.8 release, anyone can build a mobile core network on Arm devices ranging from small Raspberry Pi to large Ampere servers and even Graviton instances. With an off the shelf radio and a small server, you can create your own private LTE network or extend your coverage with a fixed wireless network.
Open source projects such as Magma are great areas to collaborate on initiatives that push the boundaries of technology. Allowing companies from various markets to join in creating a foundational solution that can be leveraged by all to collect performance metrics, evaluate new solutions and even leveraged for commercialization. One of the unique aspects of the Magma project is the well organized build CI and test CI structure. An ODM can join the community and create a test runner that executes the latest code on their networked device every time a change is done in the project. This makes collaboration scalable by allowing individual to manage the parts that matter to their organization.
To learn more about the Magma Project, check out the following resources and upcoming events:
For a more interactive experience, go to the workshop and learn how to build your own private LTE Network.
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