Geocaching with my Nokia N95

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Geocaching has become almost a mainstream hobby these days. So on a previous weekend, I gave it a try to find out what this is all about. As I don’t have a dedicated GPS device, I wanted to use my Nokia N95 with the built in GPS receiver for the purpose. With a quick search I found exactly what I needed for the purpose: "Geocache Navigator" by Trimble. The software is free if you can live which an occasional advertisement, of which I haven’t seen one yet, though.

Strangely enough, the Geocache Navigator is a Java based program but seems to have been specifically developed for Nokia Nseries phones with a built in GPS API. I tried the program both with the built in GPS receiver and my external GPS Bluetooth mouse and it just works fine.

A "cache" can be hunted in several ways with the program. Either you use the program to find starting points for caches around you including instructions what to do at each waypoint, or you use the PC to  visit a geocaching web site such as www.geocaching.com, locate a cache and print out the instructions. I preferred printing out the instructions to downloading them to the program.

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Despite the program requesting access to the network, it’s not required if the instructions are printed out beforehand. In this case, however, the GPS co-ordinates have to be typed in manually. As you can see in the second picture on the left, I managed to find my first cache 🙂

For a visual explanation of how the program works, have a look at Trimble’s video that shows how the program works. Very nice, it won’t be the last cache I’ve hunted 🙂

Oxford Tech Conference Roundup

Last week it was a great pleasure to attend Oxford University’s Future Technology Conference. Hosted by Peter Holand, Ajit Jaokar and Tomi Ahonen, the event brought together over 70 people from all over the world, coming from as far as the U.S. and South Africa.

Unlike other conferences that mostly focus on presentations from new startups in the mobile domain, this conference had a much broader spectrum, which was reflected by the many refreshingly different topics presented during the day. Below are a couple of notes I took for contemplation. In addition, I’ve uploaded some pictures to Flickr.

Mark Selby, Vice President Industry Collaborations, Nokia:

  • Mobile is about creating, consuming, interacting and connecting
  • Berthold Brecht about the radio: It is nice that it is talking to me, but I would like to talk back.
    TV = unhealthy fixation with furniture
  • DRM is a waste of time, people will always find a way around it. Social acceptance of ownership is necessary in the same way that it is accepted by most today that breaking into someone else’s house is not acceptable.
  • Augmented Reality: I’ve reported about this before and Mark had a remarkably new application: What if you could point the camera of your phone towards a building and a server back on the Internet then recognizes the building and tells you about restaurants inside, apartments for rent, etc. In my opinion, still some years away, but I see a great potential here.

Jonathan MacDonald, Blyk:

  • The ‘community’ doesn’t see themselves as the ‘community’. Everybody sees himself as an individual!
  • The advocacy dial: ignore, review, engage, recommend
  • Personal recommendation: The best form of advertising
  • Offers solutions, not services

Niklas Blum, Fraunhofer R&D Institude FOKUS

  • Reported on how to integrate web services with IMS. Interesting slides, my question, however, who integrates with whom, telco with web 2.0 company or vice versa remains.

William Volk, CEO NyNuMo

  • Reported about service uptake of his games on the iPhone.
  • Discovery is crucial and Apple did a superb job with application discovery for the iPhone.
  • Since his games are browser based, they could be easily adapted to Nokia Nseries browsers.
  • However, Nokia has no content discovery in place that comes even close to that of Apple.

Tomi Ahonen vs. Dean Bubley

  • The great mobile debate: Will the future of the Internet be shaped by mobile, or is the PC still in control? Hilarious debate, no clear winner 

Simon Cavill of mi-pay

  • Gave a great presentation about using mobile phones to send money between countries, mostly from immigration countries such as the U.K. back to Africa.
  • I’ve reported about M-Pesa before, which is something similar but only on a national basis. This one works for sending money home, bypassing expensive services such as Western Union. Hopefully, his slides are put online by Forum Oxford.

Antonio Vince Stabyl – CEO of itsmy.com (Gofresh)

  • Great presentation of his mobile social networking service.
  • During the presentation, he mentioned that the service first became successful when it was discovered by users in the U.S. markets with reasonably priced flat rate mobile data.
  • Virality kicked in when people having data flat rates recommended the service to friends.

Christian Lindholm, Fjord

  • As always a thought provoking presentation around user interfaces.
  • “Users only exist in mobile & the drug industry”

And that’s it for the roundup. Once the link to the presentations is available, I’ll put it into the comments section below. Thanks to Peter, Ajit and Tomi for the great event. Looking forward to an ‘encore’ in 2009!

WiMAX Certificate Authorities

Unlike UMTS and LTE, it looks like WiMAX will not make use of SIM cards but instead embedded authentication information directly in the device. In a world where only private keys are used, this would bind the device to an operator, i.e. a nice look-in scheme. WiMAX however, uses X.509 certificates issued by a certificate authority. If I understand things right, operator look-in of a device is then decided by whether the public key of the certificate authority is known in public or not. It looks like Verisign for example issues X.509 certificates for WiMAX. Now my big question now is: Are the public keys of certificate authorities used for generating WiMAX X.509 certificates public knowledge? Anyone?

Getting Internet Access with ‘3’ in the U.K.

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I arrived in the U.K. yesterday for attending the Oxford University Future Technology Conference in Oxford today. Naturally, wireless Internet connectivity needed to be assured right away, so I figured I would go and buy a ‘3’ Pay As You Go SIM and activate the 1 GB for 30 days broadband Internet access offer (for details, see here). I managed to get one in the end, as this blog entry is proof of, but it was a bit easier said than done:

The first ‘3’ store I found did not have prepaid SIMs without phones available, out of stock… O.k. no worries, there is more than one ‘3’ store in London. So I went to a second store which did have SIM cards but there I was told that the Internet would only work with their own phones. I challenged the guy, he gave me his SIM card and I showed how well it works in my non-‘3’ N95-8GB 🙂 Not that he knew what an ‘APN’ was…

After the initial denial phase, everything worked like a charm and I was set up in 5 minutes:

  • Within a minute, I had a SIM card and a 10 pounds top up voucher and activated the SIM by calling 444.
  • Before activating the Internet add-on, I had to make another call to 444 to put the 10 pounds on the SIM.
  • Afterwards I went to the My3 web page received via the SMS above and activated the Internet Light 1GB add-on.
  • Very nice, works like a charm 🙂

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Speeds in London’s busy Oxford street are quite o.k., about 1 MBit/s in downlink and 60 kbit/s in uplink. Not the best I’ve ever seen but it will do nicely. Thanks, 3!

Mobile Devices Are Getting Ahead of the Networks

I still remember that in the early days of GPRS, the main problem was to get mobile devices that could actually make use of the new network service. The story repeated itself with UMTS where where things became even worse. When UMTS first started, there were lots of networks around but no or only clunky mobile phones available for at least a year or so.

In the meantime it looks like the situation has reversed. Quite a number of 7.2 MBit/s HSPA devices are available, but only few networks yet support ten simultaneous downlink spreading codes and have the required backhaul capacity to the base station. With HSUPA it is quite similar. A number of devices, mainly USB sticks, are available on the market today, but most networks still lack support. And it’s not only in UMTS, where devices are far more capable then most networks today.

Even 2G mobiles now support features that most networks are lacking. The AMR (Adaptive Multi Rate) speech codec is a good example. Widely supported in handsets today, but only used in few networks today, despite the potential capacity increases the feature offers to operators. Or take DTM (Dual Transfer Mode), which enables simultaneous voice calls and Internet connectivity for GSM/GPRS/EDGE devices. Again, many mobiles support this today and it could be put into good use especially with feature phones. However, I haven’t seen a single network that supports it in practice.

A worrying trend. Are the standards bodies specifying too much?

A German Fixed Line Number in Paris

People have become accustomed that they can take their mobile phone, roam abroad and still be reachable via their national phone number. Nobody needs to explain this to a caller anymore, the concept is understood even by non-techies. With VoIP, the same concept also works for fixed line numbers. And this is where the trouble starts.

I am a good example: I have a German fixed line phone number from a German SIP VoIP provider which I use over DSL in my apartments in Germany and Paris with a Nokia N95 and alternatively with a cordless phone attached to a POTS to SIP converter box sitting next to my DSL router.

However, the concept of having a German fixed line number in Paris is still a difficult concept to grasp for many. More than once I struggled to explain ‘no, I am not really in Germany, I am in Paris’, because the usual answer is, ‘but how can that be, I called your German fixed line phone!?’

With the changes happening in the telecom industry today, i.e. the move from circuit switched telephony to SIP and the introduction of combined fixed/mobile telephony, there will be a point when it will seem normal to people that there is no longer a difference between fixed and mobile telephone numbers and that the telephone number no longer represents a geographical location. Once this point is reached the industry will have come a long way.

So the question is, when will that be!? What do you think? 5 years, 10 years, even longer?

Wifi Tracing with an eeePC

About a year ago I figured out how to use a Linksys WRT54 Wifi router and Wireshark for Wifi packet tracing and reported about it here. Now I have found another inexpensive tool for the job, which is equally helpful.

Background: The problem with Wifi packet tracing and Windows is that the wireless card drivers do not report the Wifi specific headers and also can not be set into promiscuous mode, which required to pick up packets from other devices in the network. On Linux, things are a lot easier, as drivers forward the required information.

I recently bought a Linux based eeePC, for quite different purposes, but now stumbled over instructions how to make Wireshark work with it and how to set the Wifi chip into promiscuous mode. I gave it a try today and it works like a charm. I love Wikis!

Here are some additional hints I unfortunately can’t add to the Wiki as a login is required…:

  • Starting with Wireshark 0.99.5, WPA decryption is supported with manual key input. Very helpful for tracing real networks. Note: While I have this version on my Windows PC, the Debian packet manager only installed 0.99.4 on the eeePC. As a consequence, I have to wait with WPA decryption until I open the tracefile on the Windows PC.
     
  • For the WPA decryption to work (later on on the Windows PC), the eeePC’s network card needs to be set to a network without encryption before promiscuous mode is activated. Otherwise, the Wifi chip seems to reuse the previous encryption key and tries to decrypt the packets instead of delivering them as they are to higher layers.

I’ve already made some very interesting discoveries when tracing my N95 in idle mode with the SIP VoIP client active. Lots of power save, polling and other Wifi management messages going back and forth which can’t be seen when tracing the Ethernet layer only. More about that in a future post.

Network Vendors Supporting Evolved EDGE

Last week, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) press department did a good job announcing that they will support Evolved EDGE and double data speeds in GSM/EDGE based networks. Speculations started to go wild and the word iPhone was sometimes heard as well.

Well, by the time evolved EDGE hits the street the 2G iPhone will (hopefully) long be history. NSN says they will have it ready for operators by the end of this year. Which means that at best, we will see this available in some networks by mid- to end of 2009 at the earliest. Apple should have a 3G version of their phone by then, no? And besides, for those still having a 2G iPhone when evolved EDGE is available, they won’t benefit as it requires more than a simple software update in the mobile.

Anyway, it’s good to see that NSN is not the only vendor standing behind evolved EDGE. Others such as Ericsson and Nortel have announced their support (here and here) for about the same time frame long before.

Next, I am waiting for a word from mobile device vendors when they will support it. In the past they have supported features much earlier than they were available in life networks. DTM (Dual Transfer Mode, voice + packet data simultaneously) is a good example which Nokia already seems to support for ages now. I haven’t seen a network yet, however, that supports it.

The Good Side of Operator Diversity for Handset Manufacturers

Every now and then I just wonder why Nokia just can’t their feet on the ground in the U.S. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that there is only T-Mobile and AT&T as GSM operators (plus a few small ones) and no direct sales channels or service providers like in many countries in Europe!? While the U.S. market is certainly big in terms of number of people, Nokia’s opportunities via only two carriers are rather small. Even if both worked with Nokia they can only address half the population, as the other half is with CDMA carriers. And if only one of those two doesn’t like Nokia (anymore), the opportunity is instantly cut in half. Compare that to markets such as Europe where there are at least 3 to 4 operators in each country. If Nokia falls out of favor with one of them, that’s not really a problem, there are so many more operators in so many more countries to do business with. O.k., it’s a lot of work to talk with so many operators but in the end it might greatly reduce their risk. And then there are the service providers in many countries or even laws that mobile phones must be sold independently from subscriptions. In countries where this is the case, Nokia depends even less on carriers.

Fixed my N95 SIP Problem in Paris

Every now and then I enjoy a break from book writing and other high level work and fix a problem at its base. In a previous post I reported about my joys with the N95 SIP VoIP client and the little quirk I have with it in my home network in Paris: Outgoing calls take 30 seconds before they start. Since the phone works fine in my home network in Germany I figured that there must be something wrong on the network side. However, without some tracing tools there is no telling why.

So when I returned to Paris this time, I brought along an extra Wifi access point and an Ethernet hub so I could trace the traffic between the N95 and the Internet with Wireshark to see why the outgoing call is always delayed by 30 seconds and to figure out if I can somehow fix it.

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The picture on the left shows what I saw at first. As per the standard, the Nokia SIP client sends a couple of DNS requests to get the IP address of the SIP server and the STUN server. As per the standards, the SIP client on the phone doesn’t use standard DNS requests but uses DNS SRV (service) requests which do not only resolve a domain to an IP address but a domain name + service (SIP + STUN) into an IP address. Looks like my brand new ADSL2+ D-Link modem/router can’t handle them because they simply remain unanswered. Eventually, the SIP client in the phone gives up and sends a standard DNS query to get the IP address of the SIP server. All well at this point, registration is successful and the SIP client goes into service state.

When making an outgoing call (packets marked in black in the picture), however, the SIP client suddenly remembers that the DNS SRV requests for SIP and STUN were not successful in the first place and sends them again. Once more, they are not answered. After 30 seconds (hello!) the SIP client gives up and places the call without pinging the STUN server first. Doesn’t seem to be a problem in practice as the router opens the UDP ports anyway.

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O.k., so the solution is to turn off DNS relaying on the router. The D-Link router might be stupid as far as DNS is concerned but at least one can turn off it’s stupidity and instruct the client devices to send DNS queries directly to the external DNS server. And voila, everything starts working as it should. The second picture on the left shows how the SIP client behaves once the external DNS server properly answers the DNS SRV requests. The client registers in a flash and for an outgoing call quickly pings the STUN server an then places the call. Wonderful!

So who’s to blame?

I guess 90% of the blame should go to D-Link for a crappy DNS implementation. Guys, how can it be that the latest generation ADSL2+ router can’t do DNS right!? I am speechless. 10% of the blame goes to Nokia. Why are you trying to contact the STUN server with fruitless DNS SRV requests when it is quite obvious they have not been answered in the past?  Being somewhat more flexible on the client side wouldn’t hurt 🙂