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When I was in Seoul a year ago for the first time I was suffering a bit as Korea is one of the few countries I traveled to that didn't have prepaid SIMs for mobile Internet access. But the world keeps changing, I thought, so before going to Seoul again recently I did a quick search on the Internet if the situation had changed. And indeed it had, there's now a KT Telecom MVNO called Evergreen offering prepaid voice and data services with SIM cards that can be bought in convenience stores at the airport. Eureka!

Of course I tried it out and the basic steps described here are quite simple. Following the instructions it took me only a few minutes to buy the SIM card for 30.000 Won (€21) with a balance of the same amount on it at Incheon airport. After a couple of minutes and one or two device reboots, again as per the instructions, the phone registered with the network. Fortunately the phone configured the APN on its own as there was no mention of it in the instructions. So far so good. In the default configuration, the 30.000 Won are good for around 590 MB of data (55.8 Won per MB) which is quite a lot already.

To get a higher data volume from the credit on the SIM it is possible to activate a data package, e.g. the 1GB package for 16.500 Won. This is were things get a bit tricky. The first step is to download the “Evergreen Mobile Services” App from the app store (Evergreen is the name of the MVNO on the KT Olleh network). The app can then be used to activate the data package. Unfortunately once that is done, Internet connectivity is cut because the service expects the user to top up this amount or to move the amount from the 30.000 Won from the voice bucket to the data bucket. The later operation can be done with the App but only if you find an alternative Internet access over Wi-Fi, as the connection was cut due to the activation of the bundle. No, that does not make sense and it's very inconvenient, but that's how it worked for me. After finding an open Wi-Fi access point I could then transfer the credit from the voice bucket to data bucket with the mobile app and Internet connectivity was restored instantly. A nice side benefit of activating the data option is that the remaining balance of the SIM card can be used for voice calls without cutting into the available data volume. So instead of 3 Euros a minute to Europe I only paid around 46 cents.

Apart from this slight activation hickup, the service worked well and I always got throughput rates of several megabits per second when I tired. So if the 590 MB are sufficient for your trip, don't bother with the activation of the data option. If you want more, make sure you have a Wi-Fi hotspot available before you attempt to activate a data bundle.

Pretty much whenever quarterly reports are presented by telecommunication operators these days there is the usual note about the difficult situation they are facing due to the investment required to keep networks up to the rising data demand. But is this really the case? The 2012 report of the German telecom regulator (in English) has some interesting numbers on that.

In 2012, invest in fixed and wireless telecommunication networks in Germany was around 6 billion Euros. That's the combined sum of invest of all market players. Hast it risen in recent years? Not according to the report. In reality, invest has remained pretty much stable over several years and compared to the overall revenue in 2012 of around 58 billion Euros that seems a quite reasonable number, at least to me (see page 81 of the report).

Let's have a look at some more related numbers: While invest has remained stable, the number of employees in the telecom sector went down from 184.200 to 176.000 in Germany and the pressure can be felt. End customer prices might also have shrunken but I would argue that this was mostly compensated with higher use. This is reflected in a slight revenue decline from around 60 billion Euros in 2009 to 58 billion Euros in 2012. But when looking at the EBIDTA of Vodafone Germany which for 2012 was 3.359 billion Euros out of a revenue of 9.641 billion Euros then I don't really see big suffering.

Once a year many telecom regulators in Europe publish their yearly analysis of the state of competition in the telecommunication market. A while ago, the German regulator has published it's report for 2012 (in English) which contains, among many many other interesting numbers, the amount of data transported through fixed in wireless networks in Germany.

As per the report, 4.3 billion gigabytes of data were transported through fixed line networks in Germany in 2012 (page 77) compared to 0.139 billion gigabytes (or 139.75 million GB to sound more impressive) in wireless networks (page 78). In other words, there's 30 times more data flowing to and from fixed line connections compared to wireless.

According to the report there are 28 million fixed line Internet connections in Germany today and thus the average monthly amount of data per line is around 12 GB. Also interesting is the rise of fixed line data from 3.7 billion to 4.3 billion gigabytes from 2011 to 2012, that's a rise of 16%. In wireless networks the amount of data transferred rose from 93 million GB to 139 million. That's a 30% rise which is quite substantial but far from the doubling or tripling the year before and the year before that respectively. In other words, the growth has been slowing down for a number of years now.

The report further says that there were 139 million mobile subscribers in Germany in 2012 out of which around 40 million are actively transferring data (page 79). This made me think a bit. I pay around 40 euros a month for my fixed line Internet and telephony connection today and around the same amount for wireless connectivity. And while the fixed line is shared, every family member has an individual mobile contract. So in effect I pay less for my fixed line connection when broken down per user compared to my wireless subscription and on top transfer over 30 times more data over it. Or put the other way round I pay more for my mobile subscription then for my fixed line and use it far far less.

All of this makes sense if wireless networks are more expensive to build and maintain than fixed line networks. But is it really cheaper to drag a fiber cable close to people's homes these days and then have a copper wire to each individual house or apartment compared to setting up a base station on a rooftop that servers one thousand users? I have my doubts.

Which device will be my next smartphone? I've made my choice and it will be the Fairphone. It's in the process of being built by a small company established in the Netherlands and the aim is to produce it with the people and the environment in mind. No children labor in African mines, fair wages for Chinese works and safe working conditions. In addition the company is open about the whole process of building the device and using an open operating system, i.e. Android and perhaps Firefox OS and Ubuntu in the future.

The device is in production now with shipment foreseen around Christmas time. One interesting piece of information I recently came across when I wanted to get an update on their status is the cost breakdown of the device's retail price of €325 based on a production run of 25.000 devices. Here are some noteworthy numbers:

• €129 design, engineering, components, manufacturing

• €4.75 prototyping

• €4.25 reseller margin

• €9 certifications (CE, GCF, RoHS, FCC, Reach) and testing

• €63 taxes (VAT, etc.)

• €11.75 personnel costs, office space, IT, travel

• €11.00 legal, accounting

• €6 events

• €5.25 webshop hosting

• €18.25 warranty costs

• €11 interventions (sustainability, being fair to people and environment)

For the full details, see here. If you are interested in how a phone is built from scratch then the website is a treasure trove of information. Bring some time…

I was recently faced with the dauntingly tedious task of doing throughput testing which meant uploading and downloading files from HTTP and FTP servers and noting the average throughputs in each direction separately and simultaneously. This is fun for about 30 minutes if done by hand but gets very tedious and even confusing afterward as constantly triggering up- and downloads makes you loose your thread at some point when your mind wanders somewhere else during the downloads. So I decided to automate the process.

There must be about a zillion ways to do this and I chose to do it with cURL, a handy command line tool to upload and download files in just about any protocol used on the net, including http, ftp, pop, etc. etc. It's ultra configurable via the command line and has a great variety of output options that make later analysis such as averaging downloads speeds of different files very simple.

For doing repetitive downloads I came up with the bash script (works well under Ubuntu and MacOS):

#!/bin/bash
URL="http://ftp.xyz.com/name-of-file"
OUTFILE=test-down.csv
rm test-down.csv
curl $URL -o /dev/null -w '%{size_download}, %{speed_download}n' >>$OUTFILE
curl $URL -o /dev/null -w '%{size_download}, %{speed_download}n' >>$OUTFILE
curl $URL -o /dev/null -w '%{size_download}, %{speed_download}n' >>$OUTFILE
cat $OUTFILE

The URL variable holds the URL to the file to be downloaded. Obviously if you test high speed links, the server should have enough bandwidth available on its side for the purpose. The OUTFILE variable holds the name of the local file to which the file size and download speeds are written into. Then, the same curl instruction is run 3 times and each time, the result is appended to OUTFILE. While the script runs, each curl instruction outputs information about current speeds, percentage of the download completed, etc.

And here's my script for automated uploading:

#!/bin/bash
UPURL="http://xyz.com/test/upload.html"
LOCALFILE="10MB.zip"
OUTFILE="test-upload.csv"
rm $OUTFILE
curl  -d @$LOCALFILE $UPURL -o /dev/null -w '%{size_upload}, %{speed_upload}n' >> $OUTFILE
curl  -d @$LOCALFILE $UPURL -o /dev/null -w '%{size_upload}, %{speed_upload}n' >> $OUTFILE
cat $OUTFILE

The trick with this one is to find or build a web server as a sink for file uploads. The LOCALFILE variable holds the path and filename to be uploaded and OUTFILE contains the filename of the text file for the results.

Note the '.csv' file extensions of the OUTFILES which is convenient to import the results to a spreadsheet for further analysis.

When GSM was first launched in Europe a long long long time ago back in 19992 the GSM logo could quite often be seen in advertisements. It's gone a bit out of fashion in the past decade but every now and then I still stumble over it like in the image on the left I took in Bratislava. I've done a lot of research into the history of GSM but I could never find any information on the logo. Who designed it and what do the 4 dots you can see in the "M" of GSM signify. Who put them there? It's all a big mystery. If you know something about this, I'd be glad if you could share it in the comments below.

Back in August I reported that I suddenly found a use again for Bluetooth connectivity after I haven't used it for quite some time thanks to my new Notebook now including a Bluetooth radio. Since then I've added yet another one. As I travel a lot I like to have a good loudspeaker connected to my PC in hotel rooms either for listening to music or for watching a movie streamed from the PC to the TV set in the room. When I looked for a Bluetooth enabled small loudspeaker two years ago I didn't find any, at least not in the size I wanted so I opted for a cable based loudspeaker. So I was quite surprised that two years later it's quite easy to find small Bluetooth enabled loudspeakers produced by many companies. Quite an interesting change. So I bought one and it just works fine with my Ubuntu powered notebook and with my Android smartphone as well. Great!

When updating the software of my devices I am usually a bit cautions and wait a couple of days after patches and updates are announced just in case it is discovered that the update breaks something and needs to be fixed. While this tactic usually works it somewhat failed me recently when two updates massively failed within the hour. Luckily the Internet came to the rescue.

The first major fail occurred when updating the Ubuntu distro on my media PC from 13.04 to 13.10. While everything looked fine during the update, the system would not let me log on after rebooting. All I saw was a mysterious error message after typing in my username and password before I was thrown back to the login prompt. WOT!? One can be skeptical about Google but they do find things quickly and thus rescued the day. Only a few hours before somebody posted a fix for the issue: Switch to the console and unistall Cinnamon and the Nemo file manager which I installed previously as Ubuntu has castrated the Nautilus file manager to be basically uselessness. Could this really be the issue? I was skeptical at first but it worked and I could log in again. So much about installing software from third party repositories… Fortunately, the Nemo file manager made it into the official Ubuntu repository in the meantime and I could re-install it from there without the issue re-appearing.

Once that was fixed I updated Thunderbird to apply the latest security patches on my production notebook. That can't possibly go wrong now can it? It seems it can as I stumbled right into the next issue. After restarting Thunderbird, the Lightning calendar just showed and empty window. WOT!? Two minutes and another Internet search and I found out that for a yet unknown reason, updating Thunderbird broke the plugin. The solution: Downgrade Thunderbird until Lightning is updated as well. Fortunately I do not use the pre-packaged Thunderbird so I can apply security patches quicker than with the default Ubuntu install. I guess that saved me this time as I just had to rename the directory and download the previous version again.

So was I too quick with the updates? Perhaps, but from a different point of view my somewhat cautious update behavior has saved me nevertheless. If I had updated both systems earlier I would probably not have found a fix for both issue on the net. And while I can live with a broken media PC for a while, a broken Thunderbird on my production notebook would have been totally unacceptable. So perhaps I waited just long enough.

Another takeaway from this is that without people out there sharing information via blogs, message boards and other means, things would be a lot more difficult and some even impossible. And it's not an overstatement, I still remember how desperate I was sometimes in the days when I 'only' had books e.g. to learn programming and getting stuck often meant hours searching for an answer in seemingly endless trial and error loops.

Back last month I was musing about how 2G we still were only 10 years ago which makes it even more amazing what has happened since in the mobile domain. When looking at UMTS and LTE and how they were used in their early years I see a striking difference. When UMTS first launched it took quite a while for devices to actually become available and even longer before there was a general take-up. For quite a number of years, UMTS base stations were just sitting there producing heat but were actually little used.There were probably a number of reasons for this. One was certainly that mobile Internet access was a novelty and only used by few. In addition, content readable on small screens was even scarcer. And on top, screens were tiny by today's standards and devices were bulky. Not a good mixture for fast take-up.

With LTE the story is quite different. There was perhaps a time span of one year after the launch of networks during which networks were mostly used with LTE capable USB data sticks. The situation changed quite quickly, however, due to devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S-III and the iPhone becoming LTE capable. Yes, there were certainly other LTE smartphones available before those two but those still seemed to have something of an experimental character to me and probably weren't sold in high volumes. And LTE had the invaluable advantage that by the time the networks were launched, mobile Internet access had become mainstream, devices thin and screens large enough for enjoyable media consumption.

And here's my personal LTE timeline:

• 2009: Lot's of talk about it, but nothing commercially deployed
• 2010: Experimental network deployments
• 2011: Mass rollout of networks
• 2012: First LTE capable smartphones that could actually be bought became available
• 2013: Real LTE usage with the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S-III

 

 

A quick observational post today from the Hong Kong metro. Not surprisingly, smartphones and tablets are universally used by HK residents in the metro these days. What I found surprising, however, is what they do with them while commuting. While I was expecting that most of them would browse the news, this was actually an activity I couldn't only seldomly observe. Instead, by far the number one application is texting in all forms and shapes. Next is playing offline games, followed by watching videos and making phone calls. Only few people were actually using it for web browsing or reading and ebooks. Quite a different usage from my own in public transportation. But then I am fortunate enough that my suburban trains are usually only two thirds full and I usually get a place to sit and open up the notebook for writing blog posts, emails, etc.