Martin – Page 218 – WirelessMoves

Still no Cellular in the London Tube

I really like London and do come here often, but as soon as I go down an escalator to take the tube, my cellular signal fades away and I feel like my hands are bound until I surface again at the other end of the trip.

That feeling is of course heightened by having good underground coverage in most other cities I usually travel to and I keep wondering why on earth London, capital of a nation that has fierce competition amongst network operators and good network coverage hasn't come around on this issue yet!?

Even in mobile markets that aren't known for their competitive environment such as France, the metro is fully covered, even between the underground stations. Worries about terrorists using the network for their purposes are in my opinion also no good reason for not going forward. Previous attacks unfortunately worked despite no cellular network being present to trigger anything.

Also, arguments that it's difficult to find space for cables also don't count as Transport of London has just finished deploying their underground Tetra network. Signaling equipment being sensitive to GSM or UMTS? Unlikely if TETRA (probably on 450 MHz) doesn't confuse the equipment…

And finally to those who argue that people using the phone create disturb others, take a Eurostar to Paris and convince yourself of the opposite. Most people in the metro use their phones for texting, emailing and web browsing as it's just too noisy for lengthy phone calls. So no worries here either.

So please, everyone involved, give yourself a push to finally do it and join the rest of the developed world!

Mobile Ticketing – Paper or Plastic – Some Thoughts

Thalys rail is pretty innovative when it comes to onboard Internet in their trains and ticketing. In addition to the standard tickets than can be bought at the railway station or via the Internet and then sent to you, they also offer print-out tickets via the web, they offer using the Paris metro card (Navigo) as a ticket and they also have a completely ticket-less offer in combination with a mobile phone for trip details and last minute updates. Lots of options to choose from.

It might be surprising but so far I haven't touched the ticket-less option yet, I still much prefer something to print out and to take it with me. It's mainly habitual I guess, but there are quite a number of other reasons for that as well:

I don't have to register.

I usually order my tickets a long time in advance, like for example 6 weeks. A lot can happen in 6 weeks.

I usually don't travel alone so buying one ticket for the mobile phone and one on paper makes things difficult.

I like having a piece of paper I can use to look up times, train numbers, etc. again.

Should I loose the ticket, I can just print it out again. That's much simpler than figuring out what to do should I loose my metro card or, heaven forbid, my mobile phone.

But I guess one of these days I will register and give it a try because there is one important advantage of going ticket-less with Thayls: Their print-out tickets can't be exchanged or returned so the sale is final. In other words, not all tickets can be printed out. I am not quite sure, but it seems the ticket-less tickets can be modified just like the plain old ones. Well, we shall see.

One way or another, mobile and virtual tickets haven't quite arrived here yet.

Wi-Fi Tracing With Ubuntu and an Acer Aspire

If you are running Linux on a PC, notebook or netbook with a Wi-Fi card it's "relatively" easy to use the system together with Wireshark for WLAN tracing. Since Wireshark version 0.99.5, even WPA decryption is supported so Wireshark also decodes the packets from other devices in your network.

Relative is a relative term though as it seems that depending on the Wi-Fi hardware and the drivers used, there are different ways to set the network card and protocol stack into monitoring mode. This is necessary to send the full 802.11 Wi-Fi frames to Wireshark. On the Asus eeePC 701 running Xandros Linux it works as described in this post.

On my new Acer Aspire One D250 with an Atheros AR242x 802.11abg wireless chip running Ubuntu 9.04, things work a bit differently and it took some experimenting to figure things out:

The first step to install "iw" via the Synaptic package manager. Once installed, setting the Wi-Fi card into monitoring mode is quite straight forward with a couple of commands via a shell:

sudo ifconfig wlan0 down
sudo iw dev wlan0 interface add mon0 type monitor
sudo ifconfig mon0 up

At this point the Wi-Fi card stops working as a normal network interface and Wireshark gets a new network adapter "mon0" that can be used for tracing in promiscuous mode. Unlike with the original eeePC that required the Wi-Fi card to be configured for an unencrypted network before switching to monitor mode to prevent decryption of some packets before they reach Wireshark, this is not necessary on the Acer.

The picture on the left shows how Wireshark needs to be configured via the preferences menu for decoding encrypted packets. Different network cards might need different settings here. Changing the configuration and clicking on "apply" makes Wireshark go through all packets already traced and apply the changes. This way it's not necessary to generate a new trace which testing different settings. For the WPA decoding to work, it's necessary to know the encryption key to capture the key exchange of the device to monitor. In other words, the Wireshark trace has to be started and only then should the device to be monitored enter the network.

Once done with tracing the network adapter can be set back to normal operation with the following commands:

sudo ifconfig mon0 down
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

Happy tracing!

Vodafone Websessions Keep Timing-Out

Sometimes you have to look at the good sides of things going wrong. Every now and then, I use Vodafone's Websession offer in Germany as it is a convenient way to go online occasionally. If it works… Over the summer, unfortunately, I have observed continuous glitches. Everyone has glitches now and then and I wouldn't haven mentioned it at all if it was only a singular occurrence. But this one keeps dragging on.

So here's what's going on: In most failure cases, automatic initial redirect to the payment web portal works, the money is deducted from the account, but anything else either results in nothing or a technical error message on the portal. In most cases, disconnecting and re-connecting a couple of times from the network helps the service to come back to its senses. Not so, however, when I recently needed it. While I was charged and the service kept insisting that it would forward me to the requested page after connecting to the network, it never did no matter how often I tried to re-connect.

So what's the good side of this you might wonder!? Well, the good side is that Wireshark revealed a bit of how the service works and I learnt a couple of things:

First, the services uses a transparent web proxy that redirects all http requests to the landing page with a “moved temporarily” answer to a HTTP GET request for any page until the session is paid for or directly after re-establishing a network connection to display the remaining time of the session.

Second, the web proxy also responds to a request to a web page if there is a problem with the service. In the most recent one, it answered web page requests after a while with a “504 Gateway Timout”. The picture on the left shows how this looks in practice. The server information element of the message is set to “WebProxy/5.0”. From that I assume that each and every requested web page flows through the transparent proxy. This, by the way, is also supported by the network based picture compression that can be deactivated via the Vodafone dashboard software or by including a special http header parameter in every request.

O.k., I've learnt enough this way now, so please Vodafone, fix this service!

Snapshot from Paris Metro Cabling for GSM Coverage

Here's a rare snapshot (for those of you interested in network details…) of a splitter/combiner for GSM coverage inside the Paris metro. An interesting detail: The component covers all frequency bands between 870 and 2170 MHz, i.e. both GSM bands are supported as well as UMTS. So while I don't know if UMTS capable antennas have been installed underground, at least the cabling and passive components seem to support 3G once they want to upgrade the underground system. So, how about it?

The Hollow Operator – From Operator to Owner

LightReading Insider has recently published a paper on the trend of mobile network operators outsourcing operational tasks to external service companies. This includes maintenance of existing core and radio networks, network monitoring and operation, performance monitoring, capacity management, new network rollouts, introducing and running services and many other things. Very interesting to me, and since LightReading was kind enough to send me a copy, I took a closer look.

LightReading chose the term “Hollow Operator” for their paper. Interesting wording and it makes me wonder about how many operational tasks can be outsourced before the term “operator” no longer applies!? What is a network operator that doesn't operate its network anymore? A network owner?

One of the main reasons for companies to outsource work that is not at the core of their business to reduce cost, which, if it works out, makes them more competitive. Global services companies taking over operational tasks such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Huawei and others add to this that their global structure allows them to grow the business by improving net subscriber revenue, making the network more operationally efficient, and can develop the right plan to evolve a network for future consumer demands. And a global structure they truly have. Ericsson states for example […], that they have 37.000 people working for them in their service division, 28.000 close to the customer and an extra 9.000 globally). Many of those people are likely to come from network management deals were network operator staff joined the service company when the contract was signed. From a technical point of view, a big advantage is that information and knowledge on how a network can be operated efficiently can be shared, for example by continuous streamlining of company wide processes as a result of what is learned by operating many networks.

Skeptics argue that outsourcing itself does not improve anything on its own. In the end, funding has a lot to do with how things develop. If not funded appropriately, outsourcing can quickly turn into degrading standards. Also, outsourcing is difficult to reverse in case one day the network owner wants to take back operation. Once employees are gone and operational procedures integrated into a different company, it's difficult to get employees and procedures back in house. Unless of course, the outsourcing contract contains clauses for such a circumstance. Also, outsourcing increases complexity. Any extras that would previously have been handed down the internal hierarchy is now an external business matter between two companies. That means such requests are answered with a quotation as it wasn't included in the original calculation in the contract. That doesn't help to speed things up. On the technical side, there is no network that is like any other. Each network operator has different components in different configurations and uses different software versions. In short, while processes for network management inside a service company are probably similar, each network requires dedicated experts to deal with that configuration which in turn limits to port the lessons learned from one network to another.

Many more things can be added to support and counter network operation outsourcing and I can highly recommend Lightreading's paper for further reading. I'll leave it at that for the moment but please feel free to add your thoughts by leaving a comment below.

Mobile & Personal vs. PC & Shared

Observation of the Day: Yes, Tomi Ahonen is right when he says that one of the big advantages of mobile devices is that they are a personal device vs. PCs which are often shared between several persons. That doesn't only have an impact on applications and marketeers who want to target their ads to a specific group, the context in which Tomi used the statement, but also influences the behavior of person to person communication.

I have several friends, non-techies, families, etc. who share a single PC so when they go online in Skype or some other VoIP program on the PC, you never really know who will answer your call or who will read that IM. Yes, a PC can be used with several accounts but it seems most people do not use the feature. On the mobile, on the other hand, rarely someone else than the owner picks up or reads the IM or SMS.

An interesting difference.

Android and Huawei + T-Mobile and Prepaid

Android, Huawei, T-Mobile and prepaid, a very interesting combination! T-Mobile has just announced in the UK and also in Germany that they will ship Huawei's first Android smartphone in October. That's interesting from a number of different angles and the press release contains a couple of other interesting points:

First, Huawei has tried for some time to enter the mobile phone business with very mixed results to say the least. With Android they are launching another attempt and have found a mighty ally in their quest, T-Mobile. Announced back in February 2009 at the Mobile World Congress, Huawei seems to have pretty much met their projected release date. With T-Mobile going public, that probably means that both hardware and software must be well on their way, otherwise T-Mobile wouldn't push it that strongly.

Second is the price point: T-Mobile UK has announced that it will sell it in a prepaid bundle (no strings attached, no monthly contract) for 179 pounds, which is around 215 euros at the current exchange rate. For a smartphone with large display and touch screen, that sounds like an ultra-competitive price. It even undercuts Nokias 5800 low price touch phone, which currently sells for around 290 euros. Let's see how processor speed, camera and other features work out at this price point. And that's only the initial price. I'd say it's quite likely the price will drop over time. Also interesting that T-Mobile UK announces the phone together with a prepaid offer. Definitely not targeted at the high-end market then.

Third is the data option: The post linked to above quotes the T-Mobile UK representative saying that an all you can eat data option for the device is 5 pounds a month. I guess they won't allow tethering but even without, the price is quite stunning and only a third of the current rate described here. 5 pounds a month on a prepaid SIM will probably make mobile Internet access interesting for even more people.

Orange in the Metro

Over the past year I have noticed that the Orange 2G and 3G network was getting slower and slower in the Paris metro, especially during rush hour. At some point it was almost unusable, with Opera Mini page load times exceeding 15 seconds. The strange thing was that it affected both the 2G and 3G network, so it's difficult to tell if this was due to an overload on the air interface or some other bottleneck in the system. Whatever it was, however, it has improved a lot lately. Opera Mini pages are now loading very quickly again and the e-mail client retrieves incoming messages in a flash. What ever you have done, dear Orange, it has worked. Or is it just that all the "Blackberries" are on vacation at the moment? Let's hope not…

Growth of the Number of Smartphone Operating Systems

About two to three years ago, a lot was written about mobile network operators and mobile developers and their difficulties resulting from the need to develop and maintain their offerings for number of different mobile operating systems and Java implementations. These days, however, I don't come across such reports often anymore.

I find that a bit surprising because instead of the number of mobile operating systems going down and thus also the concerns of network operators and developers, the number has actually gone up. Especially in the smartphone sector, Nokia and Microsoft no longer have a dominance and the list has become quite long these days:

Nokia with Symbian / S60,
Nokia with Maemo 5,
Microsoft with Windows Mobile,
Google with Android,
Apple with the iPhone OS,
Palm with the PalmPre WebOS,
RIM with the Blackberry OS.

Some are still more niche than others but all are quite popular in the news media and except for Palm, who's limited to CDMA for the moment (but probably not much longer), devices of all vendors can be seen in the street.

Also it seems the platform of choice for software development has shifted. Some years ago, you were working on Nokia / Symbian if you had a cool application. These days, I don't hear much of that anymore, with most developers having gone to the Apple platform.

So while for developers and network operators things are probably not getting any easier, the good things I see in diversity are more competition resulting in interesting new developments and better resiliency of the ecosystem against pandemic malware attacks.