PA Consulting Group develops Time And Relative Dimension In Space, fits a 30ft base station into a 3 inch Raspberry Pi. As for the Pi, a BBC fan would tell you, “It’s bigger on the inside!”
Well… not really a TARDIS, but they do demonstrate call processing capability for phone-to-phone communication, and to that extent, managed to shoe-horn that digital processing and switching function into a Raspberry Pi.
While there is no way that the Pi can substitute for a cellular base station, it does show a trend of where the industry is heading, and that is towards smaller cells and off-the-shelf hardware. Some day the cellular network will simply be RF access points with IP connections to a virtual network cloud consisting of off-the-shelf equipment.
Come to think of it, Moore’s Law is a digital TARDIS, constantly baking 30ft of ingredients into a 3-inch pie.
