Radio Base Station


Radio Base Station is the commercial name given to the family of Base Stations developed by Ericsson, typically constituting a sizable part of the Radio Access Network. Radio Base Station is also the generic name to be used instead of BTS which are typically denoting GSM-era radio base station technology. For other vendors, specific equipment names are used such as Huawei DBS or NSN Flexi base stations.

History and Market

Over the years every Mobile Telephony Base Station developed by the multinational has been sold with this name, although the concept of Radio Base is that of a transceiver that is primarily intended for serving as a trunked radio system Base Station for voice communication.
A popular version of this RBS base station is the RBS6000.

Technical information

Depending on which kind of RBS, there are different hardware configurations.

RBS2000 Technical information

A legacy version of the RBS is the RBS2000 which usually has a combination or subset of these hardware cards:
RBS6000 can be used for GSM with DUG cards, UMTS with DUW cards, and LTE with DUL/DUS cards.
The RBS site can be interconnected to the rest of the RAN with a SIU card which use either electrical, microwave or optical backhaul to the rest of the RAN and also provides Abis over IP connectivity for GSM base station.
RBS runs the embedded Operating System OSE from Enea from Sweden.

RBS hardware cards

The RBS6000 cabinet usually uses these cards to achieve function:
The RBS is managed locally thanks to Ericsson software named "OMT". OMT is what is usually called a LMT. A special cable is needed to connect to the serial port of the RBS with the LMT. This cable has the following simplistic pinout:

2 ---> 3 
3 ---> 2 
5 ---> 1

The more complete and official cable has the following pinout:

5 ---> 1 
3 ---> 2 
2 ---> 3 
8 ---> 4 
7 ---> 5 
4 ---> 6+8 
6+1 ---> 7

Technical information access

Ericsson has a policy that enforce controlling information about its RBS network element so that few people can access technical information and/or operate the RBS base station. Such attempt at controlling information dissemination used questionable DMCA take down requests on telecom industry forums for example.