Friday, March 29, 2019

Cellular emulation routing to internal network

So we all know about "stingray" type devices that are essentially man in the middle cell phone towers that attempt to get clients to connect so they can spy on them while relaying traffic through to a real tower. I read that these have to be registered with the carrier who owns the end tower in the US now in order to be legal.

I'm curious though, are there any legal issues with running a cell phone site that doesn't connect to any carriers?

Assuming that is legal, is it technically possible to run your own cell phone site that also routes traffic through an internal network including out to the internet?

There are two goals I have. One would be to get cell phones to connect to this site and then prevent them from routing out to the internet. Essentially a "jammer" that isn't actually interfering with anything and is following RF laws and protocols. The signal would be so low that only local cell phones would get a strong signal and therefore attempt connecting, in theory. I don't know how most clients deal with this, is an "on network" cell tower with low signal still favored over a much higher signal that is "off network" and potentially even unknown in terms of the operator?

The second goal is to take this idea further and still allow some internet or other network access while not allowing many other services like texting, certain sites like Facebook, etc.

How legal are these concepts and how technically challenging would it be to achieve for LTE as an example?

Is the main obstacle going to be legal transmission on these frequencies? I assume cell repeaters like you can buy from carriers are just amplifiers but these still transmit on the same frequency right? How is this legal, is there some amplification loophole?



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