Can you get a cellular connection over a wire?
That is, instead of having 500 little radios connecting to one or two nearby towers, can you negotiate a direct connection to the tower and use the entire cellular stack except for the PHY ?
The only solution that seems to work is old school SIM card hosting in a SIM bank. In some narrow cases, e.g. sender is in the country and receiver is in the same country, you might have pretty good (95%+) reliability of receiving critical SMS (A2P traffic), but still far away from what you'd call reliable.
I’ll bet it’s possible, just not organizationally possible…
I’ll bet there are $80k Agilent / R&S rigs that can wire to a tower and do the entire cellular stack except for the PHY…
Would love to see pictures of such a connection in practice.
But the real problem here isn't technical, it's a business/legal issue: the carriers and their regulators are trying to minimize (or at least, reduce) the ability for bad actors to operate large numbers of "cell phones" at minimal cost/complexity.
So everything that could be done (technically) to make this work is, in practice, prevented by those business/legal considerations.
Open source stacks are already or basically on the verge of being obsolete in most of the world's telco networks if you want to actually use them. They are incredibly cool and a huge undertaking but no one is saying they are practical for actual usage, and that's ignoring the clear illegality of broadcasting with such firmware.
Osmocom and others like FreeCalypso only work on very old devices with TI Calypso chipsets.