I haven’t written a lot about the Internet of Things (IoT) so far as there are so many different approaches discussed, specified, prototypes tested and proprietary solutions rolled out these days. In other words, it’s not easy to keep an overview and to get a feeling which solutions might might become popular and which will fade away over time. But it looks like 3GPP is finally getting their act together with LTE enhancements in Release 12 and 13 for a wide variety of different Machine Type Communication (MTC) scenarios and the Internet of Things (IoT). While I’ve found information about many different things in many different places I couldn’t find an overview that sets all of these things in perspective. So I decided to do it here. Read on for the details. Continue reading Cellular IoT – The Dust Slowly Settles – MTC, NB-IOT and Things In Between – Part 1
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Tell Mozilla If You Need Thunderbird
I’m pretty unhappy with Mozilla these days for a number of reasons. For one thing I don’t really see any improvements in Firefox anymore that would matter to me. Then there’s a lot of soul searching going on at the moment that has culminated recently in some cloudy talk about the Internet of Things and that Mozilla’s wants to have a role in that domain. Makes me wonder what that might be… To have enough time to think about that it seems they have binned their work on Firefox OS. And, to make things even worse, their Thunderbird email client and online calendar solution has become the unwanted step child to want to get rid of as soon as possible.
I’m especially unhappy about their attitude towards Thunderbird because it is the cornerstone for many who want to download their email on the PC and deal with it in the cloud. Also, Thunderbird is my desktop client for my Owncloud calendar I synchronize across my different devices. So I would expect Mozilla to keep actively developing the software instead of just having it in maintenance mode and trying to get rid of it.
My Kernel Bug’s Gone With Ubuntu 16.04
7 Days, 15 Terabytes and 1 Kernel Bug Later was the headline of a post back in March this year in which I described how I was chasing a problem with file read and write performance that got worse the more RAM I put into my notebook. With 16 GB of RAM, file write speeds deteriorated after only a few gigabytes and I finally chased down the issue to a kernel bug. Fortunately, after upgrading from Ubuntu 14.04 with a 32-bit 3.13 kernel to Ubuntu 16.04 with a 64-bit 4.4 kernel the problem went away. In addition, file read and write behavior has changed completely
Beware of GSM Service On Board of Aircraft
When I recently flew from Europe to India with Lufthansa I was quite happy to have Wifi on board. For 17 Euros I could get access to the Internet for the complete flight. Not cheap but if you take the ticket price into account it’s acceptable. Like on this flight earlier in the year, connectivity was somewhat slow and patchy but good enough for many things. In addition, this plane was also equipped with a GSM cell. What sounds cool at first turns out to be a massive money trap if your are not careful.
Prime Use For UMTS Fast Dormancy Today: Fast Reselection to LTE
Just a quick thought today about a use case change of a feature over which hard battles were fought about in the past: UMTS Fast Dormancy.
Continue reading Prime Use For UMTS Fast Dormancy Today: Fast Reselection to LTE
Eduroam Setup For Ubuntu 16.04
Eduroam is a great Wi-Fi network setup for students. With certificate based authentication, setting it up securely is a bit of a hassle. Once done, however, one benefits from a per device Wi-Fi encryption key and international roaming capabilities. I very much like the system and have described my experiences here and here. For Ubuntu 16.04 and later, however, the security configuration has changed and one has to be careful as there is no security warning if an old setup is reused. Read on for the details.
A COW in New York
When I was recently at Times Square in New York I noticed an interesting looking trailer: A Cell on Wheels (COW). Either a network operator had a problem with one of its permanent base stations or they needed some extra coverage for a live concert in progress at the time at one of New York’s busiest places..
20 MHz in Manhattan – I’m Surprised
With a few hours to spend before flying back to Europe, I went to New York’s impressive public library for inspiration and contemplation. While I was there I also ran a quick trace of how much spectrum is in use for LTE by network operators in the area.
LTE Air Interface DRX Settings in Practice
In a previous post I’ve given an introduction to how LTE Discontinuous Reception (DRX) for power saving works in theory and which parameters can be configured by the network in practice. In this post I have put together a number of typical configurations I have seen in practice from Portugal, Spain, France, Germany and the US.
LTE DRX – A Bit Of Theory Before We Look How It’s Done In Practice
I recently noticed that LTE power saving settings are significantly different across different networks in different countries. Before sharing this info I thought it would be good to have a quick overview post of how LTE power saving works and which main parameters the network can configure.
Continue reading LTE DRX – A Bit Of Theory Before We Look How It’s Done In Practice