Gateway Quick Start Guide

Nice! You got a FreedomFi Gateway! High-five!

We know for some of you the idea of a bash terminal makes you want to bash your head against a wall. We feel that. We want setting up your cellular network to be as easy as possible. Lucky for you, at FreedomFi we have made the process all GUI based, as easy as we can, with zero bashing.
In this guide we’ll cover all the steps needed to get your gateway up, a radio added to Magma, and your SIM card added.

But, before we do that, let’s start with a quick overview of all the components in your FreedomFi enabled network. Here’s a picture of the components.

Magma Orchestrator – The orchestrator is the backend processes that run in the cloud which keep your network running smooth. Orchestrator holds all the state and data of your network including the configuration of gateways, your metrics, and analytics. The FreedomFi orchestrator hosts multiple tenants, each with their own networks.

Network Management System (NMS) – The NMS is the webUI that lets you interact with your network.

The Magma Federation Gateway (FeG) –The Federation Gateway is used to connect to other networks for authentication, authorization, and accounting. If you don’t need to connect to other networks, you don’t need to worry about the FeG for now.
Home Subscriber Server (HSS) –The HSS is where your subscriber data lives. When you get SIM cards, your SIM data gets mapped to a subscriber name in the HSS.
FreedomFi Gateway – The FreedomFi Gateway is a pre-packaged Magma Access Gateway (AGW). The AGW performs the core functions of the LTE/5G network. For LTE this includes MME, SGW, PGW. For 5G this includes AMF, UPF, UDM

eNB Radio – The eNB Radio is the base station transmitter of your LTE or 5G network.

UE – The UE (or User Equipment) is the end user device. These are usually smartphones or home router type devices. But UEs can take many forms.

Step 1. Register for your orchestrator tenant
To register for your orchestrator tenant go to https://freedomfi.com/register and complete the form. At the end of the process, you’ll get an email with a link to the NMS in your new tenant.
Step 2. Configure your Network in orchestrator

The first step is to set up a new Network in your orchestrator. Networks in Magma share common properties including:

1. Broadcast PLMN

2. Subscriber / SIM data base

To setup a Network we do the following steps:

1. Choose Add Network

2. Choose a Network name and ID

NOTE: Network ID must be made up of lowercase letters, numbers, and underscore characters only.

3. Choose Network Type = LTE

NOTE: For the majority of FreedomFi customers network type = LTE will be the right choice. If you think you need an alternative please contact support.

4. Exit Administrative tools and go to Network Management

5. Click on the Network icon

6. Click Edit button above EPC configuration

7. Configure EPC parameters and Save

8. Click Edit button above RAN configuration and select RAN tab in the popup

9. Configure RAN settings and Save

Step 3. Wire up your Gateway + Radio (eNB)

1. Plug it in like this

NOTE: WAN connection should have DHCP service to give your gateway an IP address + DNS server. This way your gateway can see the internet and the orchestrator.

2. Navigate to the Equipment page

3. Download your provisioning file and put it on a thumbdrive

NOTE: Place the ‘freedomfi.lic’ file in the root directory of the thumbdrive. This just means not inside any folders on the thumb drive. Also, don’t rename the file, that may confuse us 🙂

NOTE: Gateway initial provisioning takes 10-20 minutes with most internet connections. It is important you allow 10-20 minutes with power and internet connected to the gateway at this step as we update SW and configure your gateway. Any power interruption during that time may require bash terminals and support calls and other such nerdery to recover.

4. Put the USB thumb drive in the Gateway and Power it on

With the thumb drive in, here is what to expect as the Gateway powers up:

1st beep about 20 seconds after you power it up. It’s alive!

2nd beep up to 1 min after that (your gateway is connected to the internet!)

3rd beep up to 20 min or later (this one depends on your internet connection speed and latency, so can fluctuate, please be patient grasshopper).

NOTE: If you jumped the gun and already powered the gateway up a while ago, no worries, put the thumb drive in and wait for the beep. You’ll be on the 2nd beep above at that point. We check for that file every couple of minutes until we find it.

Step 4. Add the Gateway to your Network

OK, now that you have everything plugged in we need to tell the orchestrator which network to add your gateway to. You may only have one network right now, but in the future you may have more. The FreedomFi Gateway zero-touch provisioning process brings all of your new gateways into a simple drop down list. From there, you can easily add each new Gateway to your desired network.

Here are the steps to add your gateway to your network:

NOTE: We are going to use many of the same values when we created your network. Depending on your network, you may want to provide different values here that would override the matching parameter configured at the Network level. For a single Gateway network, we will keep all values the same.

1. Click on “Equipment” icon

2. Click the “Add New” button

3. Click on the drop down to see a list of your registered Gateways

NOTE: Gateways in this list will be identified by their Private IP address and/or the public IP address they use to help you identify gateways when you have more than one registered but not assigned to a network.

4. Select the Gateway you would like to add

NOTE: this will autofill the HW ID and ChallengeKey values unique to this gateway.

NOTE 2: If you get here and your list is empty, that means your gateway is still working on provisioning. Refresh your browser window in 5 minutes and try again.

5. Add a Name, ID, and Description

NOTE: Lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores only can be used for Gateway ID field. Also Gateway ID cannot be changed once saved without deleting and re-adding gateway. So you know, pick a good one.

Also note, leave version blank, we’ll fill that in automagically when the gateway checks in with orchestrator.

6. Enable Log and Event aggregation

7. Accept defaults for your EPC settings

NOTE: Here the default is to have NAT enabled. This should work for most deployments. To disable NAT we have a separate guide to configure that.

8. Accept defaults for your RAN settings

NOTE: For now accept the defaults, we’ll come back after we add your eNB and change these settings to match.

9. Accept defaults for your APN resources.

NOTE: We accept the defaults here for basic network deployments. APN Resources are for multi-APN configurations. These are covered in another guide.

10. Look for check-in with orchestrator

NOTE: Gateways check-in with orchestrator every minute to sync up on all kinds of data. Now that your Gateway is added, refresh the Equipment page until you see the health say “good” and the last check-in time shows within the last minute to two.

Done! Your gateway is now added to orchestrator!

Step 5. Add your radio to orchestrator

Now that we have your gateway, let’s add the radio to the orchestrator.

1. Click on Equipment icon

2. Click on eNodeB tab, then click Add New button

3. Give your radio a name, and put in the serial number, add a description (optional)

NOTE: Similar to gateway name, this cannot be edited once chosen without deleting and re-adding radio. So pick a good one!

4. Select the toggle for “eNodeB Managed Externally” and then set your RAN parameters to match your eNB configuration

NOTE: These values must match what you have configured in your radio webUI. In particular TAC value must match to allow S1AP connection. The Cell ID must match to enable MME Connected status display in NMS (in Baicells this is called ECI or Cell ID). IP address must match S1 IP (sometimes called WAN IP) to track eNB bandwidth stats. You can update it later if unsure or if it changes.

5. Now let’s go back and attach your radio to your gateway, click on Equipment

6. Click on the ID of your gateway

7. Click on the “Config” tab

8. Click on the RAN edit button

9. Select your radio from the drop down menu

All done!

Step 6. Add your APN

An Access Point Name (or APN) is used to route traffic to a specific data network and apply Quality of Service (QoS) policy to that data like bandwidth limits, and priority. We will start by making a basic APN to be used as your default. You can always get fancier later.

1. Click on Traffic icon then click on APN tab

2. Click on Add New APN

3. Mouseover the apn_name field and click on the green notepad edit button

4. Enter “internet” then click the green check mark to save

NOTE: Your APN can be any name, internet is a very common default that devices use, so it’s a good choice for your default.

5. Edit rate limits for your APN, mouseover “max_bandwidth_dl” and click green notepad edit button

NOTE: APNs have rate limits. By default these are set to 1Mbps. We like to increase them to 100Mbps to make sure our cell is working well. You can come back anytime and reset your APN rate limits lower or higher with the same steps.

6. Enter a new value and click the lower right green check mark, repeat for the uplink rate

NOTE: This extra button appears to save the number as a number, not text. It is important to save this setting using the checkbox the arrow is pointing to.

7. Click Save to save your new APN

Whew! You did it! We know editing JSON is scary. We are working on a pretty pop-up for APNs. Until then, this guide is always here to remind you how to edit them.

Step 7. Add your SIM card to orchestrator

Last step in the setup is to make sure that orchestrator knows about your SIM card and has the security keys needed to make the super secure connection to your UE.

1. Click on Subscriber icon then click on Add Subscriber button

2. Click on + symbol to open add subscriber view

3. Add your SIM data, click the check mark, then click Save and Add Subscriber

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