Why is there no 3G-324M open source protocol stack?

3G-324M can be found in over 450 million handsets worldwide. A software based protocol stack that is needed in every 3G handset, 3G-324M, however, has absolutely zero open source implementation? Because it is not IP based.

Commercial value

The open source model succeeds; not because people want to contribute and invest their time in free software; it is because corporations are finding a way to support such investments by getting their revenues indirectly - by selling maintenance, services, training, advertising or other techniques.

Most of these revenue generators tend to rely on a large, sharable computing platform - the internet. Once you provide an open source technology over the internet “platform,” you can complement it by selling a service (Software as a Service anyone?).

Low entry barrier

Open source resembles organic growth. People opt to invest their time and effort in it and they will place that investment in their own desires and needs. No exact roadmap exists, no real target. To be able to develop a successful open source project, there should be a real market need for it, with a low entry barrier. The open source community needs to be able to come up with a solution that can be used, tested, developed and deployed at a low cost.

This usually boils down to technologies that are IP-based, as an IP-based stack exists today in every operating system that values itself. Since this is the case, developing open source products over IP is relatively simple - developers can focus on what they are developing and not on building the infrastructure from scratch.

Back to 3G-324M

3G-324M lacks these two aspects.

There is a lot of commercial value in 3G-324M, but this is a closed system solution. It is a point to point protocol, with no servers in the middle that can be used to monetize the use of a protocol stack. There is no internet connectivity, no web browser involved, and no way to get any commercial value in an indirect way.

3G-324M also possesses quite a high entry barrier. It is not IP-based, but rather circuit switched-based. To develop it, people need to deal with low-level standards and real-time multiplexing (H.223 protocol). It is different in its mind-set than IP protocols and it requires a large number of tasks to be accomplished before getting anything useful:

• Implement the low-level H.223 multiplexing
• Implement the 3G-324M signaling and call control mechanisms
• Find and integrate video codecs
• Find and integrate audio codecs (AMR - no G.711…)
• Find and integrate with a baseband

All of these tasks are not easy ones and require a lot of hard work. As there is no way to monetize on it besides building a full product, there are either in-house 3G-324M stacks or commercial 3G-324M stacks.