Personal/community cell tower

Would running a 4G modem outside your house for yourself or you community help with anonymizing where your location is? You can run these things for relatively cheap now with HATs on raspberry Pis and stuff like that, so starting a small cell network with custom SIMs and whatnot would be interesting if it would help anything/be legal

>>27716 There are two scenarios I am getting from your post here: 1. You are just going to stand up some cellular equipment and start using it with your friends. It certainly wouldn't be legal in the US. In order to accomplish this you would need to overpower the signal strength from the near by towers to trick the phones into connecting to it. Law enforcement already does this with a device called a "stingray". You would mess with everyone else' cell connectivity in the area and you'd be violating FCC rules in this scenario. 2. You want to start a cellular company which only you and your friends use. This is a legal path but it is so expensive that unless you are independently wealthy you won't be able to afford it. You could just sublet existing cell providers like the cheaper providers do but they are essentially just providing access to existing infrastructure. A much more feasible option is an overlay network. Something akin to a VPN, TOR, i2p, etc. Apple announced that they will provide a feature in their iOS 26 update that will limit a cell carriers ability to get exact location details from devices. That makes me think there is a lot going on the cell client side that is allowing the privacy issues, which can probably be disabled in some way. After all, Apple is doing it in some way right? Perhaps some research into how cell networks and clients function would be helpful here. The 5g infrastructure is pretty well documented.

> Apple announced that they will provide a feature in their iOS 26 update that will limit a cell carriers ability to get exact location details from devices. Really? I wonder how that interacts with calls to emergency services.

>>27720 According to apple: > "...it does not affect the precision of location data provided to emergency responders during an emergency call." > "It also only limits the location data available to mobile networks, and it does not have an effect on location data shared with apps through Location Services. " According to this article it only works when the carrier is cooperating and only with the new Apple designed modems. So maybe there is actually a lot more going on there. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/26/ios-26-3-limit-precise-location/

>>27716 And you connect to the 4G modem using what... wifi? as a proxy web server using tunneling? I'm going to assume it's the second option. If a lot of people use it, wouldn't it be just like these LTE proxies services?

>>27716 You dont actually have any options for phones, the radio spectrum is licensed, you cant use unless your gov lets you. Rogue cells are illegal by default, and as someone else said you'd have to overpower the local tower to force your phones to connect to it, on most cases (manipulating broadcast parameters like PLMN and priority also work but for a residential area you'd need to crank it up either way). If you "allow"/force people to connect, that's a bootleg stingray. If you dont, it's functionally a jammer. It wont really matter what your intent was. As a rule of thumb assume anything related to transmitting radio waves without a license is illegal by default except in a couple of cases that are irrelevant to LTE (HAM, CB, ISM). Receiving is usually OK as long as you dont decrypt any packets you dont own. It would help anon your location like any other jammer, I suppose, but not for very long. From the carrier side we'd just see a zone where phones start detaching and we have random RLFs with no auth reattempts and assume a repeater or amp broke or there's something weird going on like industrial equipment messing things up. We'd send someone, report a jammer and then call the cops I suppose. If its a stingray it will take us a week to care. If its a jammer it will take us two days. Also carrier equipment is really expensive. You can get a HAM station that reaches the moon (Harris Falcons, like $10k on ebay. $12k for a Icom IC-7851) on a cloudy day for the price of our cheapest small cell amp ($20k or so) with money to spare. You'd be genuinely wasting your money if you wanted to go the legal route and be your own provider even at the small enterprise level.

>>27717 Apple is getting intp the business of selling location data to LE I suppose.

>>27716 No, but you can do 2g/3g sms phishing and send messages to iphone users and android users that havent' disabled it so 99%. It's fun to mess with people / I keep getting annoying phishing messages from banks when I happen to be in the Philippines saying "you have x points, click here to spend they expire today!" for the past year so I assume it works, and they probably could see my UM/AN due to paging channel/they mask it as local towers. >>27717 you would issue your own sim cards for that, easily possible not new, was popular to do in 3g days, with 4g equipment being decom'd would be fun. they had it at defcon since 2019, so