Month: November 2016

Wireshark is a great tool and sometimes I wonder if I use it more often than a word processor. It’s great to analyze things manually in real time or from saved packet captures after the fact. On top of that wouldn’t it be great if you could analyze network packets in your own code and act when a defined set of conditions are met? For a long time I thought that this would be a lot of hassle to pull off but it’s actually a lot easier than I thought.

Continue reading Pyshark to Analyze Wireshark Decodes With Python

In a previous post on this topic I was asking if anyone knew what the ‘g’ in gNB stood for. I got quite a number of suggestions but nobody knew for certain. So I dug a bit deeper and found the person who actually suggested the term.

Continue reading 3GPP 5G NR – What’s the ‘g’ in gNB all about – Part 2?

A while ago, I had a post on a Linux shell command to get the current power consumption of my notebook. Recently, I exchanged my battery for a new one and wanted to keep track not only of the discharge rate but the other parameters as well to see how quickly Ubuntu would recognize that it is a new battery and update it’s capacity values, etc. as well. Turns out there is a nice shell command for that as well: ‘upower’.

Continue reading Ubuntu and Battery Details on the Shell

A couple of days ago, I had a post on the status of 5G and realistic timelines. A lot of politics is involved concerning the dates and when to do what but few technical details have so far emerged without looking deeply into the meeting minutes. Zahid Ghadialy over at the 3G4G blog, however, has now dug up some interesting technical details.

Continue reading Blog – Verizon’s 5G and a video by R&S

When using a Wifi network at home for voice telephony everything’s great and shiny as long as there is enough bandwidth for the call. But when you are stuck on a Wifi connected to a slow DSL line that has only little uplink capacity and someone else on the network starts uploading cat images, things get ugly quickly. Recently I was looking into how to simulate delay and packet loss to find out how a voice call sounds over Wifi and to my surprise this is actually quite easy to do, even if you don’t have a slow DSL line available.

Continue reading Simulating Delay and Packet Loss

Wifi in the 60 GHz band has been specified since 2012 in the 802.11ad extension of the IEEE WLAN standard. It has taken a number of years but it seems that products are slowly becoming available now. Heise and Anandtech have been reviewing the Netgear X10 access point here (in German) and here and the Wi-Fi Alliance has begun certifying products. So it’s about time to have a closer look at the technology.

Continue reading 802.11ad Wifi – Whitepapers on 60 GHz Wifi

We are very close to calling LTE a legacy technology as the 3GPP ‘circus’ is not only moving from town to town but also full steam ahead on the new radio access (“New Radio”) and core network (“Next Generation Core Network”) specification process. Many players are publishing whitepapers these days about New Radio and the content has started to align in many technical details so the picture of how the new air interface will look like is becoming clearer. There are claims in the press that first operators will start deploying pre-standard 5G networks in the 2018/19 timeframe, but is that really realistic?

Continue reading Current Status of 5G in 3GPP and ‘Real’ Timelines

We have a book exchange shelf at work where people can put books they no longer need and can take out other books in exchange. Recently I found the “Cellular Travel Guide”, a 1000+ page book published in 1993 that is about how to roam in the US with your mobile phone. A fascinating historical read that takes you back 20 years to a mobile world that hardly seems real from today’s perspective.

Continue reading The Cellular Travel Guide – Back in Time to 1993