Hacker News Reader

Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Ha, reminds me of the tiny 3G picostations you could get from your mobile operator for a while when 3G was in its infancy - if you said you had really poor signal at your home, they would send you a small 3G station you could use in your home and which used your own internet for data and calls....but the hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to(otherwise you could take it say, abroad, and make calls with your own numbers without paying for roaming - not that in that specific scenario paying for roaming would have made any sense anyway).

View on HN

The geo tieing makes more sense as a product of spectrum regulation. If you move the Pico station they might not even own the resulting local spectrum.

> hardware had a GPS built in to make sure it was never moved from the address it was assigned to

There are also 911 implications.

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.nena.org/resource/collection/1F053...

If you move it, and call 911 - how does the carrier determine the address where the call originated?

ATT's product along this line was a complete failure for me. I didn't have a street address at the fixed (albeit remote) location, and there were no street addresses I could pretend to have within its tolerable radius. They had no way of enabling the device without it being near a street address.

The technology would have worked just fine, they just couldn't fill in their E911 entry with anything that would work.

If you were to take it abroad your provider would also not have a license to use the frequencies it needs.

So, some cars have a decent antenna/hardware for 4G/5G to WiFi bridge; would it make sense to have a picostation inside the car as a repeater?

I only ever heard the term Femtocell for this. Also, wouldn't an IP check suffice? Are you sure it had GPS?

Yep - https://www.engadget.com/2007-03-28-hands-on-with-the-samsun...

IP would be absolutely trivial to spoof so that's not a proof of anything really.

My static IP geolocates to a town 50 miles away. So unless it's some list that has good accuracy i wouldn't think so.

The one I had years ago did have GPS, I was told the reason was for accurate 911 locating. It was a hassle because we were trying to use it in an office and the GPS antenna needed to be near a window.

>Are you sure it had GPS?

AFAIK even regular cell sites have GPS for timing purposes.

The GPS was also required for time sync for interconnectivity with the cellular network, to my understanding.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com