Last month, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was released and I could hardly wait as I wanted to do a major redesign of my cloud services at home to streamline my setup and make it more flexible, extensible and powerful. So let’s virtualize it!
Continue reading Upgrading and Virtualizing my Cloud at Home
At least in its current incarnation, the 5G core network specification in 3GPP TS 23.501 makes it quite clear that 3GPP aims to cut the cord to older network generations. Handovers, for example, have only been defined between 4G and 5G. No interworking is planned to 2G and 3G networks. But as in Asterix comics where all of Gaul is under control of the Romans except for a small village there is one exception to this rule: SMS!
Back in 2013 I wrote a post about how long I thought my SSD would last based on the amount of data I write to the drive on a daily basis. Back then my daily write rate was 10 GB a day and based on a calculation method of Anandtec I estimated the lifetime of my SSD to be at least 14 years. In the meantime others have done practical tests of how many write cycles SSDs really endure before they die so I came back to the topic once more with my usage scenario.
Ever since GPRS came around the corner one and a half decades ago there’s been this concept of international roaming with ‘local breakout’ in which IP packets of roaming subscribers are sent directly to the Internet from the visited network. Sounds nice but in practice, it’s not really used. Instead, the current approach is referred to as ‘home routing’ in which IP packets of roaming subscribers are tunneled back to the home network and only from there to the Internet. So will this change with 5G core networks?
Continue reading The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 3 – Local Breakout
Good news on the privacy front!: When I recently installed Firefox on a new Android phone I browsed a bit through the settings and noticed that it is now possible to delete all kinds of data when the browser is closed. This includes cookies and offline website data that is often used to track usage. Also, it’s possible to reject 3rd party cookies. Very good, I’ve been waiting for these features for a long time on mobile. It could be that they’ve been in Firefox Mobile for quite some time already but this is the first time I’ve noticed it!
In part one of this mini-series on the 5G core network I’ve taken a look at some of the new concepts and how the network entities there with their new names map to what we already know from the EPC, i.e. the 4G core network. Now that this is done let’s have a look at the new names of some identifiers.
Continue reading The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 2 – Identifiers
When network operators are ready to go beyond 5G EN-DC, which basically means that a mobile device camps on a 4G cell and a 5G cell is added for additional speed, they require a 5G core network. To find out more about the 5GC, a good starting points are 3GPP TS 23.501 (System Architecture – Stage 2), followed by 23.502 (5G Procedures – Stage 2) and 24.501 (5G NAS Protocol – Stage 3). That’s quite a lot of ground to cover and while going over them I took some notes of things that I found of particular interest. This and the following blog posts are based on these notes and perhaps invite to investigate further.
Continue reading The 5G Core Network (5GC) – Part 1 – Network Entities
If you want to humble yourself as a VoLTE engineer at a point in time when you think you have more or less understood how VoLTE works, make a trace of a VoLTE conference call with a few participants and try to analyze that. You get back down to earth pretty quickly as complexity of conference calls in IMS VoLTE is staggering. But don’t despair, here are two tips how to figure this out:
Continue reading VoLTE Conference Calls – The Telco Engineer’s Darling!
There are lots of good books out there about the beginnings of the Internet in the 1960s and how people started using it in the decades to come. I specifically recommend ‘Dealers of Lightning‘ if you are interested in the early history. But how was the development of ‘networking’ in general and the ‘Internet’ in particular viewed from the outside starting in the 1970s?
Continue reading The Beginnings of The Internet From A German Perspective
If you go by 3GPP and common sense it can be expected that most operators having an LTE network today will launch 5G as what is referred to as 5G EN-DC (eUTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity), a.k.a. 5G NR ‘option 3’ in 3GPP circles. In other words, mobile devices will still camp on the existing 4G LTE eNB base stations and 5G gNB resources will be added when required. This makes sense in many cases as 5G will often be deployed on higher frequency bands and also not everywhere at first. Hence, the idea is to use the LTE network as a coverage layer and add 5G to the connection when available. Also, this has the advantage that no 5G core network (5GC) is required at first. But where do we go from here as 5G coverage gets more widespread and operators start using a 5G core network in addition to the existing 4G EPC?