Category: Uncategorized

After some years it was time again to invest in new Wifi Access Point hardware for an upcoming event and as a replacement for pretty much outdated Wifi equipment that has become the bottleneck of the network. Obviously, I wanted a Wifi router on which I could run something free and open on. After having taken a look at different options my choice fell on the Linksys 1200AC as it is said to be easily upgradable to open source router software and has good 802.11ac features for a reasonable price (€120 euros including taxes). What was a bit shocking for me was how ‘mainstream’ vendor supplied software has actually become since I last bought a Wifi access point.

Continue reading Running a Linksys 1200AC with Open Source Software

Quite a number of network operators are in the processes of shutting down their 2G or 3G networks or have already done so. A major example is AT&T who has switched off their 2G network back in 2017. In other words, they are now only running on their UMTS and LTE networks. So what will happen once they switch off UMTS as well?

Continue reading Thinking the Unthinkable: The End of Circuit Switching

Back in 2011 I had my first intercontinental in-flight Internet experience over satellite on a flight from New York to Europe. Back then I found the service extremely fast with sustained downlink speeds of 2.5 Mbit/s and 500 kbit/s in uplink. And this was 2011 when terrestrial 3G with similar speeds was the new kid on the block. Since then, things have unfortunately not improved.

Continue reading Intercontinental In-Flight Internet Is Slowing Down

Back in 2009 I posted the list of the mobile phones I owned from 1998 up to that point. Back then and even today it is interesting to see how technology evolved in those 10 years from voice + sms only to GPRS and first Internet connectivity to 3G and multimedia. So almost another 10 years have passed since then and things have changed even more since then. Time to have a look.

Continue reading My Mobiles – 2009 to 2017

I’m not very fond of having to install closed source software on a Linux systems I administrate and try to avoid if at all possible. Unfortunately I was very close at having to do just this recently when I needed to connect to a network behind a Cisco IPSec VPN gateway. Cisco has a software package for Linux for this but apart from it being not open source the installation process is far from confidence inspiring. But then I noticed that there is actually an open source Ubuntu NetworkManager plugin that can be installed straight from the Debian repository: OpenConnect!

Continue reading On Open Source Linux Client As A Cisco VPN Anyconnect Replacement

It is easy to assume that something as wide spread as a cellular network must be a mostly static installation that changes very slowly over time. As I will show in this post, however, this is hardly the case. Back in 2009 I moved into a place from which I have a very good view to a base station site across the street and since then I noticed quite a number of times that the base station configuration has changed significantly. On average, things have changed once very two years since then and I have taken pictures to document the process. The first picture shows the initial configuration ca. 2010 on the right. Two antenna configurations are stacked on top of each other and the lower configuration contains two antennas directly next to each other. In other words there were three physically separate antennas at this time.

Continue reading Base Station Visits Over The Years

It’s winter time in Europe which means its dark and cold right now. While I mostly write about books I’ve read that deal with past and present communication technology and computing, I thought I’d make an exception today for a different book on a totally unrelated topic I recently read that fits the season. My choice fell on a classic, ‘Farthest North’, written by Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen 120 years ago in 1897 about his 3 year voyage to reach the North Pole. On second thought, the book is perhaps not so much off-topic after all because after reading this book I got a much deeper appreciation of the enormous changes wireless communication brought about since then.

Continue reading Book Review – Farthest North by Fridtjof Nansen

We are quite a bit into January 2018 already and I still haven’t come around to reflect which things from back in 2017 ‘moved’ me. But finally here we go this is my 2017 round up from cellular to history.

Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2017

Over the past two days the Internet has been full of news stories about Meltdown and Spectre and how horribly and devastating these issues are. Chipset vendors scramble to update their microcode, operating systems get patched and even web browsers get an update. What I found missing in pretty much all articles, however, was how these attacks that can extract data from the kernel and other threads, actually work. So I resorted to reading the lengthy but very informative whitepapers on Meltdown and Spectre and since I haven’t found a good source that gives an abbreviated and easier to understand version I will attempt to do so myself. I was tempted to call this post the ‘Technical Elevator Pitch’ but quite frankly the elevator would have to stop for a little while to be able to finish the story. But I think it can be told over lunchtime…

Continue reading Meltdown – The Technical Lunchtime Pitch

Congress is over, long live Congress, only 360 days to go before the 35c3 opens its doors! The Twitter stream after the closing session reflects the general two feelings of participants quite well: Sadness that Congress is over and a great thankfulness for all the great experiences, impressions, thoughts and fruitful conversations with old and new friends.

Continue reading 34c3 Round-Up Day 4 – More ‘In Spite of Everything’ Required!