Author: Martin

And off we go straight into part two of my summary of things that moved me in 2018!:

Raising My Shields – Year 5

Ever since the Snowden revelations in 2013 I’ve been moving more and more services I use into my own domain and made sure as much of my Internet traffic as possible is encrypted. In 2018, I’ve made a number of significant improvements. First and foremost, Nextcloud Talk has become available and I’ve been using it since its launch for end to end encrypted and self-hosted voice and video calling. While it still continues to evolve for a more ubiquitous use from mobile devices, I used it a lot for voice and video calling from PCs in 2018.

Another weak point in my communication infrastructure has been internal email. While I made sure communication encrypted between clients and the external server, emails were obviously unencrypted while on the external server. So this year I took some time to finally put an email server in place at home for family internal emails that contain things that really shouldn’t be stored outside our domain of influence.

Continue reading Things That Moved Me in 2018 – Part 2

Another year is coming to an end again so it’s time once more to have a look at which things have moved me this year and how technology has moved forward, or not.

5G – 5G – 5G

If you visit this site every now and then you have probably noticed that 2018 has been the year I spent a significant amount of time going through the 3GPP 5G New Radio and 5G Core Network specification and have written more articles about it then I could possibly link in this post. Despite the flood of claims of 5G firsts and pseudo 5G network launches, the technology is still in the making. But that’s to be expected as 3GPP only released a first and very patchy version at the end of 2017. The people in 3GPP have taken everything apart from the radio to the core network and put it together again in a new fashion for fast and better future wireless connectivity that will keep us busy for years to come to put into practice. So here’s a link that will lead to all of my articles with ‘5G’ in it, from 2018 and other years. If you are interested if I already wrote about a specific topic, use the search box on the left.

Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2018

In a previous post I referenced a paper of Keysight as a good starting point to understand how Active Antenna Systems (AAS) that have been specified for 3GPP 5G New Radio (NR) could improve overall capacity in a cell and extend the cell range. Today, I have found another interesting paper on the topic that was recently published by Ericsson.

Continue reading 5G Active Antenna Systems (AAS) Revisited

If you are interested in how a 5G EN-DC Option 3 connection is set-up between the mobile device and different components in the network the best but also the hardest way is to look up the procedures in a number of different 3GPP specifications. 3GPP TS 37.340 is a good starting point for EN-DC. Another interesting source that I have just discovered is over at EventHelix.com. On the page, there are a number of links to call flow diagrams that aggregate a lot of information from different 3GPP specs and to a blog post with some more details and a video at the end. Interesting stuff!

In the previous post I’ve been looking at Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) being a potential solution of how I could remotely administer and support a Windows box with tools and processes I use for supporting remote Linux machines. As it turned out this works great in practice. So how about using WSL and FOSS tools to do things locally on a Windows box with Linux tools for which there are no tools that I would rate as equivalent?

Continue reading Windows Subsystem For Linux – Part 2 – Graphical Stuff

While all PCs and notebooks I personally own run on Linux, I can still not totally escape Windows on other machines. Apart from not being FOSS, the other thing that bothers me when I have to use or support a Windows machine is that the tools and programs for local and remote maintenance and backup are entirely different. But perhaps there is hope now… In 2016, Microsoft announced what is now known as the ‘Windows Subsystem for Linux‘ or WSL for short, which emulates a Linux kernel API so Linux binaries can run on Windows as well. Kind of a reverse-Wine. So how well does this work and could I use this to remotely administer Windows boxes in the same way as Linux boxes?

Continue reading Windows Subsystem For Linux – Part 1 – Remote Stuff

Speaking about how much spectrum is needed by a network operator to make a difference with 5G, I had a closer look at how the German telco regulator wants to go forward with the auction of spectrum in the 3.6 GHz band. The spectrum auction is scheduled to take place in 2019 and the details about which part of the 3.6 GHz band shall be used for which purpose can be found in German here and in English here.

Continue reading 5G Spectrum For Germany – How Much For Whom?

Back in the mid 1980’s I’ve visited my uncle at the ETH Zürich and I still remember what he showed to me that day: A Cray-1 supercomputer. There I was, a teenager with a Commodore 64 at home standing right next to one of the fastest computers on earth at the time. The very fact that I still remember the visit is a strong indication that it had a long lasting effect on me and certainly influenced my future. Now, 30 years later, I thought it was time to revisit this piece of my past and learn a bit more about it.

Continue reading Book Review: The Supermen – The Story of Seymour Cray

I’m using OpenVPN for many years now and while in the past the uplink speed of my DSL connection at home was the limiting  factor when it came to throughput, this might not be the case anymore. I was therefore keen to check if my current OpenVPN setup in a virtual machine on an Intel i3 based server can still handle the theoretical maximum throughput of 35-40 Mbit/s, which is the uplink speed of my vectorized VDSL line.

Continue reading OpenVPN Throughput Revisited

While in Europe, most network operators have the 3.x GHz band in mind when thinking about 5G deployments. Some network operators in the US, however, want to launch 5G in the mmWave bands in the 20-50 GHz range. So how will antennas in mobile devices look like for these bands?

Continue reading 5G – How do mmWave Antennas Look Like?