Re: [Openbts-discuss] why my cell phone close to Openbts then the cell phone can not register to real network?

[David A. B. <dbu...@jc...>]

John -

Oh my!  I don't mean to criticize you personally or particularly here, but this is important information to repeat sometimes and I hope lots of people read this.

You are doing at least one Very Bad Thing here and, from your reported results, probably two:

 1. You were probably testing in a band that is used for public cellular service in your area, like 900 or 1800 in ITU regions 1 or 3 or 850 or 1900 in ITU region 2.  That is Bad.

 2. You were spoofing your local public network.  That's Especially Very Bad.

There are numerous posts in this mailing list warning against these things.  There are also specific instructions in the public wiki warning against these things (like this: http://gnuradio.org/redmine/wiki/gnuradio/OpenBTSMS_Camping).  The default configuration is MCC=001 MNC=01, a test network.  You should not have changed them unless you were absolutely sure what you were doing.

So now your phones' SIMs "remember" that they cannot get service in your network.  The problem is that your network is identical to your local public carrier, so they don't bother looking for service there either.  Oops.

So, what now?  The only solution I can recommend is to power down every phone, remove and reinsert the SIM and battery, and power back up.  (And what about iPhones, where you can't remove the SIM and battery?  I have no idea.  I'll wager that a misconfigured BTS, regardless of the type, might well "brick" an iPhone.)  Anyway, if you are lucky, this battery removal procedure will fix everything.  There is a chance, though, that some SIMs will "remember" that the name of the network is now "OpenBTS" and they will may continue to show that name even after service is restored.  I don't have a good solution for that, but if you search the mailing list archives for the subject line "they want to kill me", you might find something useful.

-- David

A postscript, and THIS IS IN CAPS BECAUSE IT IS IMPORTANT:  THE CELLULAR NETWORK IS MORE DELICATE THAN THE IP NETWORK. IT WAS NOT DESIGNED WITH THE EXPECTATION THAT RANDOM CIVILIANS WOULD EVER HAVE ACCESS TO NETWORK EQUIPMENT. THERE ARE FEW SAFEGUARDS AGAINST ROGUE ACTORS IN L3. DON"T SCREW WITH YOUR PHONE COMPANY; IT IS ILLEGAL AND THE THREAT TO PUBLIC SAFETY.  (Maybe someone should put that in the masthead of the public release just to be sure everyone who runs OpenBTS see it.)



On Mar 16, 2011, at 8:29 PM, John Wu wrote:

> I set MCC and MNC the same with local GSM network, and LAC keep the default value 1000.
> I have tried the reject code with 0x11 0x0C 0x05 0x16 all with the same result. 
> Once my cell phone is rejected from Openbts it will not find other BTS and just keep trying 
> register to OpenBTS. And my neighbour's cell phone also have the same result.
> 
> On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 11:11 AM, David A. Burgess <dbu...@jc...> wrote:
> 
> What where your MCC/MNC/LAC and what reject code did you send?
> 
> And have you tried power-cycling the phone?
> 
> On Mar 16, 2011, at 7:58 PM, John Wu wrote:
> 
> > I dont want my cellphone to register to openbts so I reject it in the location update.
> > but after that my cell phone do not register to real network. Is it something to do with
> > LAC NCC or NCC permited?
> >
> > Regards!
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