Vision: the air is for everyone

Legal banner

Fairwave defaults to lab/no-RF mode. Transmitting on cellular bands without proper authorization is illegal in most jurisdictions. You are solely responsible for licenses, SAS grants, indoor restrictions, and type approval. HyperonX and contributors provide software as-is for lawful private networks, research, and shared-spectrum regimes only.

The broken system

Mobile connectivity is sold as a utility but governed like a toll bridge. Three properties of the modern mobile market create the harm:

1. Coverage is where the revenue is, not where people are. Rational MNOs abandon low-ARPU areas. Villages, basement flats, boat marinas, festival sites, disaster scenes: red ink.
2. The SIM is a leash. Your phone's identity is issued by someone else, revocable by someone else, and priced by someone else. Switching costs are engineered, not natural.
3. The infrastructure is unownable. The only box that can legally talk to your handset on licensed-by-default bands is one they operate. You can buy a Wi-Fi router; you cannot buy the equivalent for cellular without a lawyer and a warehouse.

Every year the gap widens: handsets get better, modems get cheaper, software radios get stronger - yet the baseline experience of "no bars" stays exactly where it was in 2009 for hundreds of millions of people.

The HyperonX fix

Fairwave is the community carrier: a complete, open-source small-cell in a pizza box.

flowchart LR
    subgraph Cafe["Café / Co-op / Township"]
        BOX["Fairwave pizza box<br/>x86/ARM + SDR"]
        UE1["Resident phones"]
        UE1 -- LTE --> BOX
    end
    BOX -- Ethernet --> LAN{{Community LAN}}
    LAN -- WireGuard --> HUB["Fairwave hub<br/>(internet breakout)"]
    BOX -- WG mesh --> PIX["Neighbor box"]
    PIX --> UE2["Neighbor phones"]

• Own the last mile yourself. One box, ordinary Ethernet, local PLMN. Your SIM, your HSS/UDM, your data path. Traffic for the café printer never leaves the building.
• Peer instead of plead. Boxes discover each other, mutually authenticate over mTLS, tunnel with WireGuard, and share reachability. Two boxes are already better than one.
• Break out where it makes sense. An upstream Fairwave hub (or your ISP) carries off-island traffic. Wi-Fi calling / ePDG hooks bridge you back to the national core with your consent, not by default.
• Stay lawful by construction. Spectrum arming requires a country code, a license / indoor-private / lab-attenuator acknowledgment, and a per-profile frequency allow-list. If you can't satisfy the gate, the software stays in zero-IF loopback and won't compile otherwise.

What you get, concretely

Control plane	Go: identity, enrollment, reconcile loop, REST+gRPC, Prometheus/OTLP
RAN	srsRAN Project eNB/gNB; RF (USRP/LimeSDR/BladeRF) or zmq loopback
Core	Open5GS EPC (4G-first); 5G SA/NSA stubs behind flags
SIM	Offline provisioner, Ki/OPc generation (or HSM import), bureau CSV/JSON
Peering	mDNS rendezvous → mTLS control → WireGuard data plane, route exchange
Portal	Local-first operator UI, captive portal for onboarding/Wi-Fi-calling path
Lab	Docker Compose: core + zmq eNB + srsUE; attach asserted in CI

Why it threatens incumbents

MNO value concentrates in scarcity: scarce spectrum, scarce towers, scarce SIMs. Fairwave makes the local copy abundant. It doesn't need to beat the national network everywhere - it only needs to beat it in the café, the co-op, the village. Once offload and roaming interfaces normalize, the national SIM becomes the overlay, not the access. That's an existential re-pricing of the least defensible part of the wireless cartel.

Why it's feasible now

• Open implementations (Open5GS, srsRAN, Magma lineage, OAI) crossed the maturity threshold.
• SDRs cover small-cell power levels at hardware-store prices.
• Regulators opened local/shared regimes: CBRS SAS, UK shared access, EU local licenses.
• Wi-Fi calling trained handsets to prefer a local anchor when the operator consents.
• Compute is cheap; a NUC can run EPC + eNB + control plane simultaneously.

The promise & the boundary

Fairwave's promise: if you can run a router, you can run a cell. Its boundary: we ship no code path that hides identifiers from lawful intercept where required, jams, spoofs PLMNs, or transmits outside authorized frequencies. Community infrastructure deserves the same legitimacy as any carrier - and only gets it by behaving like one. See the threat model and spectrum matrix.

Why "Fairwave-Sim"?

Because the SIM is where freedom actually lives: the moment a community can issue, revoke, and roam its own credentials, the private cell becomes a carrier, not a toy. This repo is the reference implementation of that idea.