I’m Lane Messer. Network Engineer. Private 5G builder. RF lab tinkerer. I build things that move packets.
By day, I design and troubleshoot multi-vendor enterprise networks. FortiGate, Extreme, Juniper, Palo Alto, SD-WAN, BGP migrations, SPBm fabrics. I spend a lot of time inside packet captures and routing tables.
By night, I run Lmesser-Labs. This is where I experiment with software-defined radio, Open5GS, srsRAN, CBRS, IPv6 edge cases, fragmentation behavior, and anything that makes most people say “why would you even try that?”
I’ve built private LTE cores from scratch. Generated my own SIM profiles. Broken PMTUD on purpose. Sent 33,000-byte pings just to see what would happen.
LANRanger is my long-term project. RANPI is part of that vision. A compact, lab-grade platform for learning and experimenting with carrier-grade cellular and RF systems without needing a full data center.
I care about understanding how things actually work. Not just how to configure them.
This site is a place to document experiments, share lessons, and occasionally prove that the problem was Layer 1.