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In Feb 2023, Marius Gripsgard was about to give talk on "VoLTE for FOSS" at Fossdem 2023. I have no idea if he gave the talk there. There's other information on their website no video nothing. The news was also shared on ubports blog.
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@beyolf Good morning to the hard-working Linux people. What is so difficult about the integration of VoLte for UT? Is it the fact that UT actually only runs piggybacked as a container on top of Hallium Android on some smartphone models? Do you have to rewrite the entire module from the cell phone? Then surely there can also be limitations with data processing and LTE? Why is there only information via Telegram, very cumbersome
Anyway, good luck! -
I dont really understand your post... The problem with VoLTE is the same for every OS which uses halium and vendor blobs and it is figuring out how to setup the proprietary vendor blobs. So the problem with VoLTE is not related to the OS it self but that the vendor blobs are not open and a lot of reverse engineering has to be done. To make the matter even more complicated different vendors implement VoLTE support in different way, meaning that there is no standard VoLTE setup for the different vendor blobs , which makes it harder and more things to reverse engineer. This was explained multiple times in the forum and in the Q&A sessions and also in the telegram groups.
Also why exactly are you pinging me?
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@blueque said in Status of VoLTE (Voice over LTE 4G) implementation?:
In Feb 2023, Marius Gripsgard was about to give talk on "VoLTE for FOSS" at Fossdem 2023. I have no idea if he gave the talk there.
He did not. He was not at FOSDEM, I seem to remember that he was ill and could not make it.
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beyolf I'm just interested in how the whole thing works out of curiosity as a hobby. I have no idea how all the Linux stuff is packaged in the end. I'm not pinging you anymore, take the "@" off.
Because you don't need to ping me anymore, I haven't watched these Uport videos for a long time.
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I do not have problem that you ping me. i simply dont understand why you pinged me thats why I ask.
I will try to explain simply how it works. Vendors which manufacture android phones, put their proprietary drivers and i vendor partition on the Flash memory of the device. We call this proprietary drivers "vendor blobs". Halium based OS as UT , Droidian and etc, use Halium as abstraction layer between the OS and the vendor blobs. What developers which work on halium do is reverse engineer how Android setup the vendor blobs and implement that in the halium project, then third party OSes (as UT , Droidian) use halium in order to provide different functionalities as telephony,wifi,camera,flashlight and etc.
If you want to gain deeper understanding on how exactly that is done and how halium works i would suggest to read the documentation.
In terms of VoLTE the IMS implementation is not standartized so the different vendors implement IMS functionality in different way in the vendor blobs. What we are trying to do now is reverse engineer how exactly Android communicate with the different vendor IMS drivers in order to setup the IMS functionality."
For telephony UT and other halium based OSes use ofono. Ofono have few different ways to communicate with the vendor blobs in order to provide telephony. The most recent method for achieving this is through binder (Android IPC). So ofono uses binder calls in order to communicate with the vendor cellular module. So what we are working on is understanding what binder IPC calls does Android do in order to setup the IMS for the different vendor blobs and implement that IPC calls in ofono. Sailfish OS already made IMS ofono extension for qcom based devices but this extension is proprietary and not open source.
As you can see from the explanation above the problem with VoLTE is not OS specific, but the problem is that the VoLTE vendor implementation is not standartized and for the different vendors a lot of tracing has to be done in order to understand how exactly android setup VoLTE and replicate that setup procedure in ofono for the different vendors.
Hope that brings some clarity on the subject.
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Yes, thanks, your explanation helps me a bit. So it is always a small partion where the drivers are located. Just like a PC manufacturer customizes its software, you do that. Vendor and so is clearly seen several times when flashing
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Hi,
This will become a problem in Australia soon too (and might already be an issue for some carriers here). The largest provider here, Telstra, is planning to switch off their 3G network in June 2024.
I'm not sure what the status is of a crowdfunding effort, but I would also donate, at least a small amount for VoLTE support.
Merry Christmas / Happy holidays!
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Maybe, Can refer to the implementation of Sailfish OS.
Write a plugin instead of ofono-vendor-qti-radio-plugin.
On qcom based devices use vendor.qti.hardware.radio.ims -
Hopefully all frequencies will also be supported. In Germany, LTE is supported from 700Megaherz to 3600Megaherz. 5G is already available, but I don't have the hardware to use it yet. If you don't always need special applications for devices, I don't think it's that difficult. With Waydroid you could get VoLte and VoWifi up and running with some devices. I'm just making assumptions here. With Xiaomi, for example, the whole modem and Bluetooth stuff somehow runs via a chip where the FM radio is also installed. Shailfish Os is Android again then you can also stay on Lineage Os.
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Thank you for pointing this out but we are making tests with that plugin from about a month already. We don't want to use closed source plugin that's why we are just examining how the plugin works and trying to make a new open source one.
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@DPITTI supported frequencies depend on the cellular module not on the OS
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Since I have not flashed for a long time to see the development of UT I am amazed. It seems a lot has happened in the development of UT. Are you still on Android 10 or already on Android 11 or 12 in preparation? I wish you good luck with porting.
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@beyolf said in Status of VoLTE (Voice over LTE 4G) implementation?:
Thank you for pointing this out but we are making tests with that plugin from about a month already. We don't want to use closed source plugin that's why we are just examining how the plugin works and trying to make a new open source one.
Have you figured out how the plugin works? How is the current progress?
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Hey excuse me for the late response. I didn't had the opportunity to work on UT recently, because of some real life stuff, but now I am trying to catch up. When I have some info to share I will post it here.
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@beyolf said in Status of VoLTE (Voice over LTE 4G) implementation?:
Hey excuse me for the late response. I didn't had the opportunity to work on UT recently, because of some real life stuff, but now I am trying to catch up. When I have some info to share I will post it here.
plug-in only does some status and action commands transparent transmission, there is no protocol related implementation, VoLTE protocol support is all in vendor.qti.hardware.radio.ims. Implementing this plug-in is relatively easy.
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I am new to the UBPorts community and been wanting to get a Linux phone for a while, it seems like there are a lot of people here who are willing to pay towards a crowdfunding effort to get volte added to Ubuntu touch. I found an active open source bounty website that supports multi-user bounties, and talked to them in their discord and I get the impression they'd be willing to set up a page for this if the Ubuntu touch community can provide a set of concrete bounty targets. Then whoever is interested can contribute to the bounties. I personally would contribute a small amount to a bounty. Does this seem interesting to people? If so, I will need help distilling the report into concrete bounty targets by someone with domain expertise. I think this is a setting where a lot of small bounties could add up to enough to get this implemented.
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@JohnB said in Status of VoLTE (Voice over LTE 4G) implementation?:
I found an active open source bounty website that supports multi-user bounties, and talked to them in their discord
Thank you for that work!
@JohnB said in Status of VoLTE (Voice over LTE 4G) implementation?:
I think this is a setting where a lot of small bounties could add up
I am not a programmer. Do you have an idea of how exactly these "small bountys" could look like?
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@fairose So I mean small bounties like each donator only donates a relatively small amount of money towards the same bounty but added together it could be a big enough sum of money to attract a team that could actually pull it off. In terms of defining the tasks to target with the bounties it could a single boutny with something like: "Volte works on these phones with these vendors" as the goal. That keeps it pretty simple and is outcome focused. We could also consider having a separate bounties for working volte on each each vendor/phone/region combo.
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If the VoLTE implementation is going to take some time I believe we need a work around for this.
I had a OnePlus One phone & like others got text it would no longer be supported by my carrier.
My question is this? Would carriers allow you to use these same phones they are saying is incompatible with the network if we only wanted to buy just data service and use them as a tablet instead of a phone?
And if so would it be easier to work on a solution for us to have VoIP service in that case just kind of like before you could have services such as Google Voice on a phone and use that service just like your normal phone service thru your data?
I think that would be a good solution as long as whatever app/service has no privacy concerns.