Author: Martin

Last year I was excited by a new add-on my fixed and mobile network operator of choice started offering: For 10 euros extra I could make calls from everywhere to everywhere in the EU, the US and Canada – fixed and mobile. Also, my monthly data bucket was extended from use in the EU to the US and Canada as well. Looks like the offer might have been a bit too successful as it has now been quietly discontinued for new customers.

Continue reading 1 Step Forward 2 Steps Back with My Mobile EU/World Option

Recently, I reflected a bit over how fixed and mobile networks have evolved in the past 30 years, i.e. since the mid-1980s. For the first time I realized then that during that time frame, networks have been totally turned inside out.

Continue reading Change of Times: Data over Voice to Voice over Data

Hurricanes have hit the Caribbean pretty hard this season and in many countries, mobile networks have been severely damaged. One consequence of that on the Dutch part of Sint Maarten island is that local operator UTS has decided not to restore GSM services at all due to the heavy damage. Instead, they want to migrate their remaining GSM subscribers to their 3G and LTE network. Interesting, this is the first time I’ve heard about a natural disaster as being the reason for ending GSM service.

Back in the 1980s the BASIC programming language was a must have feature on any home computer. Initially conceived in the mid-1960s it was swiftly adapted even for the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 8800 that became available in 1975. The freely available Tiny BASIC could fit into 2-3 kByte of memory and thus made it ideal for machines with only a few kilobytes of RAM and ROM. With additional features, BASIC then really took off in the 1980’s as the programming language for the masses on computers such as the Commodore 64, the Apple II and uncountable other platforms. They pretty much all had in common that programs were entered with line numbers and programs could be listed on the screen while programming and debugging. Editing code was nowhere near as easy as it is today but one could at least see a TV screen full of code at a time which helps a lot when coding algorithms with many variables and loops.

An interesting fact that is perhaps a bit forgotten is that BASIC also made it to much more restricted devices such as calculators that only had a single display line. The Sharp PC-1401 calculator that was released at the beginning of the 1980s is an interesting example. Being semi-conscious about such devices I was quite surprised when a friend recently showed me an even more restricted device that came with a BASIC interpreter but only had a single row of 7-segment digits instead of full ASCII characters and a non-ASCII keyboard.

Continue reading Basic On An SBC With A Single Line 7-Segment Display

In the first part of this series, I emphasized that in 3GPP Release 15, a major focus is to get a first incarnation of 5G into the field that complements 4G LTE. Instead of today’s approach where a device is either connected to GSM, or to UMTS or to LTE, i.e. only to one technology at a time, things will be different in 5G. Due to the higher frequencies bands used and other reasons (see part 1) it was deemed better to enable mobile devices to connect to LTE and 5G New Radio (NR) simultaneously. This is referred to as Dual Connectivity EN-DC. So how will this work in practice?

Continue reading 5G – Part 3 – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC)

An event I’ve been looking forward to for a long time is this year’s Vintage Computing Festival Berlin (VCFB) which takes place in about one and a half weeks from now, Saturday and Sunday on the 7th and 8th October 2017 in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin. If you are even only remotely interested in the history of computing and you are anywhere near Berlin over that weekend, it is the event to attend! Unlike in previous years when the dates did not fit into my travel calendar it is a perfect match this year. And best of all for me, I did not only decide to go but I will also bring a small exhibit of my own!

Continue reading The VCFB Vintage Computing Festival Berlin – 7.-8. October 2017

Recently I had to retire two electronic gadgets, a mouse and a speaker. It happens, you might say, electronics doesn’t live forever. True, but in these cases it was the first time that I had to retire devices not because their electronics failed, but because of the plastic outside that has started to become soft and sticky! Both the mouse and the speaker were still functioning properly and I used them almost everyday. Quite sad to see and a real waste!

One of the new features of 5G networks is ‘Network Slicing’. So far I couldn’t really get my head around the concept, everything I heard was just too abstract to make practical sense. Finally, however, things are getting more concrete and 3GPP TS 38.300 has an interesting section of how network slicing will work on the radio network side of 5G. Let’s have a closer look.

Continue reading 5G – Part 2 – Some Thoughts On Network Slicing

As Anandtech says ‘in a surprise move’ Intel has announced last week that they will discontinue their 60 GHz WiGig + Wifi + Bluetooth cards. As they were pretty much the only ones selling WiGig connectivity options for notebooks so far I can’t help but wonder if this move has just spelled the end for moving to mmWave spectrum in the home and enterprise domain!?

Just the other day I’ve read another article I read somewhere tat touted that 5G is about to move to where Wifi has already gone. And now Intel buries it. Let’s hope 5G doesn’t follow that example as well. But even if it doesn’t, it just shows what kind of a rocky ride mmWave frequencies are and will also be for 5G. Massive MIMO, beam-forming, beam-sweeping and lots of other technology innovations are necessary to make it work. Compared to that, the move from 3G WCDMA to LTE OFDMA was childs play.

Two and a half years ago in March 2015 I had my first post on 5G on this site about 3GPP kicking off its 5G activities. A lot has happened since then and I had the occasional post but now things are getting really exciting for me: Various 3GPP groups have started churning out the first drafts of Technical Specifications (TS) rather than refining the many different implementation options discussed in many different 3GPP Technical Reports (TR). In other words the technical specifications are now written based on the agreed-on options from the TRs. So now is the time to have a first look what is going to be put into practice.

Continue reading 5G – Part 1 – A First Look Into The TS’es