WirelessMoves

It's a bit of a paradox, I'm using the 32 bit version of Ubuntu on the PC while on one of my mobile phones a 64 bit based operating system is in operation.

There is one particular reason that made me still use the 32 bit version of Linux on my current notebook. When I set it up around two years ago I wasn't sure how backwards compatible the 64 bit version of the OS would be for 32 bit Windows programs I still have to use every now and at then for compatibility reasons via Wine. Perhaps it's no issue at all but I saw now risk or disadvantages of staying on 32 bits as Linux unlike Windows 7, which is restricted to 3GB on 32 bits, can still use the full 8 GB of RAM on my machine via PAE (Physical Address Extension). Each program is restricted to 4 GB of addressable memory but on a notebook not running enterprise scale applications that is not an issue at all. But it's definitely a kludge to ensure backwards compatibility.

As there are fewer reasons on mobile platforms to be backwards compatible it is quite a logical step to start the transition to 64 bits now. Some devices such as tablets already have 2GB of RAM inside today and going beyond the 4GB threshold is likely not far away anymore. So it's a good thing companies are thinking about 64 bits now instead of coming up with things like PAE on mobile just for the sake of dragging along old stuff.

So there we go, I'll have to live with my 32 bit PC versus 64 bit mobile paradox for just a little while longer.

Observation of the day: I find it quite interesting how Apple continues to gain mind share and users. When I was recently having breakfast in Silicon Valley, most people in the café hunched over a Macbook. My count were 7 Macs vs. only 2 Windows notebooks. Sure, Silicon Valley is a special case but I still think it is not much of an amplification of a general trend that can be observed.

It is interesting how getting connected in the US as a visitor via cellular has changed over the years from one extreme to the other. While Internet access enabled prepaid SIM cards where available in the past 5 to 6 years in many countries around the world I struggled for many years to get the same thing in the US. At some point AT&T offered mobile data on prepaid SIMs but one had to find an AT&T store and then fiddle with a pretty rough web front-end to activate a data option. Not ideal.

But things have significantly changed recently. When preparing for a business trip to the US I noticed that a number of MVNOs (virtual network operators) have sprung up that offer prepaid SIMs for mobile Internet access specifically for international visitors. Here's a PC Mag article that gives a good overview. I opted for a Ready SIM 500 MB data only SIM for around $20 (including shipping) that remains active for 14 days after first activation. Other options that include voice and and a bigger data bucket are also avaialble. It's a use and throw away SIM as there's not even an option to top-up option. That probably means that have a pretty lean back-end system 🙂

The only catch was that I had to find a mobile device that supported Wi-Fi tethering and the US 3G frequency bands of the network used by that MVNO, which were the 1900 MHz and AWS (1700/2100 MHz) bands. That's not so easy anymore as current mobile devices often sacrifice 3G bands for LTE and the AWS band was never very popular for 3G in devices outside North America in the first place. But I managed to get hold of one and I decided to order a 'Ready SIM' to my hotel as there wasn't enough time anymore for international shipping. Next time I'll order it a bit sooner so I can already use it at the airport.

In practice it only took a few minutes after inserting the SIM card for the first time before the data option was activated. In terms of speed I couldn't complain but the network managed to kill two different kinds of VPN tunnels regularly. It's a bit of a nuisance and I haven't experienced that in other countries before but I could live with it for a couple of days.

So while there is room for improvement I really enjoyed the freedom of having Internet access when out and about without roaming charges and it also spared me the $12.99 Wi-Fi charges the hotel wanted to charge me per day. I like competition.

Like most multi device users I need to transfer files between my notebook and mobile devices every now and then. As I travel a lot, I have so far abstained from installing a file synchronization client on my PC or my mobile devices as I wasn't quite sure how to ensure that the synchronization process doesn't eat into my roaming data bucket. Also, I don't want my data traversing the data center of a commercial cloud storage provider for privacy reasons. My solution was therefore to transfer files via Bluetooth between devices when they are at close range to each other. For a file or two of a few megabytes such as a camera image that approach works quite well. But for larger files such as PDF documents with a size of tens and hundreds of megabytes or larger file connections, Bluetooth is just too small. And then there are mobile devices out there that can't send files via Bluetooth at all.

For these reasons I decided at some point to give Internet based file synchronization mobile apps a closer look. Since I have an Owncloud instance running on a Raspberry Pi at home that I already use for exchanging files between PCs, privacy and confidentiality was not an issue. Also, there are Owncloud file synchronization apps available for the major mobile platforms. So I went ahead and installed the Owncloud client on two mobile operating systems to play around with it. Usage is straight forward and the apps offer full control over which files are transferred (and when) and which files are kept in sync. File transfers work just as they should and while I'm at home, my DSL router recognizes that the public destination IP address is bound to the WAN interface and reflects the packets right back into the network without a hop on the outside. That makes file transfers as fast as my home Wi-Fi allows. When not at home, transfer speed is limited to the speeds I can get over the cellular network and the 25 Mbit/s downlink and 5 Mbit/s of my VDSL connection at home. That's still good enough for most file sizes.

Great stuff and one more reason to have my private Owncloud instance at home.

When I think back a couple of years ago, getting continuous and affordable Internet connectivity when traveling outside my home country was often quite difficult. Prepaid SIM cards were difficult to get, mobile data options were difficult to activate on those SIMs, some countries didn't have them at all, data roaming was prohibitively expensive and most hotel Wi-Fi was just plain crappy. In other words it took effort and a bit of luck to stay connected in a way that allowed working with a notebook and using VoIP and video software such as Skype. But my recent experience gives me hope that we have reached the tipping point.

On several of my recent trips, hotel Internet was quite o.k., even in the evening when lots of people use it. Sure, it's not like a VDSL line at home but there was always a megabit or two available and usually also enough in the uplink direction. So perhaps hotels are learning. In Europe mobile data roaming has also become affordable enough that one can rely on it for mobile connectivity outside the hotel for smartphones and moderate PC use. Offline navigation and mapping apps such as Osmand (Openstreetmap for Android) help. And local prepaid SIMs are often sold at airports now by knowledgeable staff that can activate data options and even configure APNs in case the smartphone doesn't configure itself correctly (noticed in Hong Kong, Korea and Malta recently). With data options ranging for half a gigabyte and up for around 10 to 15 euros with usable speeds of the cellular networks they are a good alternative or supplement to hotel Wi-Fi.

Yes, things really have gotten better over the years!

Pretty much exactly one year ago I had a post about a new handy little gadget from Edimax to distribute the hotel Wi-Fi or Ethernet connection to all my devices. It's convenient, I don't have to type in passwords on all devices and in case I have no choice but having to select a hotel with paid Wi-Fi a single payment enables access for all devices. Over time I came to use the little Wi-Fi router a lot but it has its quirks and I often ended up pressing the factory reset button and fiddling around with the configuration for a while before I got it working. At some point I felt it was time to have a look if there are other alternatives available in the meantime. And indeed there are now.

In the end I chose the Asus WL-330 N150 as it is almost as small as the previous one and cost around €30. So far it does its job quite well. Setting it up for use when arriving at the hotel is still a bit tricky. The average user wouldn't have a lot of fun with it as the device is sometimes a bit slow to react before the web based interface shows up and does what was requested. But once set up the Wi-Fi connectivity seems to be stable, at least in the two hotels I've tried it out so far.

So let's see if this one is more stable than the last one.

In recent weeks I've been abroad a couple of times so I took advantage of the dual SIM capability of my current device. While I used my home country SIM for incoming and some outgoing calls I put a local SIM card in the second slot for Internet connectivity. While in most situation this worked like a charm I was almost defeated a couple of time by deep indoor situations with 2G only coverage. So what can be done? Fortunately I had another smartphone with me and another SIM card for Internet connectivity. Conveniently placed near a window there was still enough coverage there to restore my Internet connectivity via Wi-Fi covering. Yes, I know, I am taking this to the extreme… but 2G network coverage just doesn't cut it anymore when it comes to connectivity. That time has come and gone.

When Nokia many years ago launched their N-series devices, they emphasized that the mobile phone has now basically become a computer. This was certainly true from a functionality point of view with the web browser, email client and many other applications previously only available on the PC now running on a smartphone. But from a hardware point of view the device was closed and the operating system was proprietary. In other words the hardware and the software was quite unlike on a PC which was open and could run open operating systems such as Linux and BSD derivates. Consequently, programming them was also very much unlike what people knew from a PC.

Back then it was difficult to picture how operating systems would make the jump to mobile hardware, it was just too limited. But when you look at it today this is what has happened. Android is fully based on a Linux kernel and other companies like Mozilla, Jolla and Canonical (Ubuntu) are working hard to bring even more Linux delight and openness to the smartphone world. Nothing demonstrates that smartphones have really become computers better than being able to open a Linux shell and feel at home right away. The Raspberry Pi has also driven home this point as it runs on an ARM processor like those used in smartphones. And if you know Linux and the Debian distribution you immediately feel at home there despite the different processor architecture.

In smartphones, the baseband chip has become just another peripheral and is no longer tightly integrated with the higher layer operating system as it previously was. The new challenge, perhaps, is specialized hardware for the camera and graphics acceleration that have no counterpart in the PC world that could just be ported to a smartphone platform. But since baseband and application chip vendors are no longer tightly integrated with the mobile phone manufacturers, they have no incentive to keep the APIs to these hardware units a secret.

The first revolution in the last decade in mobile were smartphones that acted like computers but still had proprietary hardware and software and were thus closed to all but their manufacturer. From my point of view the second revolution, equally important, was the jump of desktop operating systems to mobile devices once they had reached the processing power to support them. As a result companies that were previously only working on software for the desktop such as Google, Apple and newcomers like Mozilla and Canonical had a desire to merge the desktop with mobile.

On the operating system level this transformation is complete. On the user interface, however, there's still a lot of work to be done. Android's user interface and those of other mobile operating systems are still tailored to smartphones and tablets, making it easier for users to use mobile devices in a mobile environment without a keyboard and mouse. On the other hand, current mobile user interfaces are limiting the usefulness and versatility of such devices in a stationary scenario, i.e. when mouse and keyboard could be used with them. That's not a problem today as their processing power is still lower than that of notebooks. But as mobile platforms are getting more and more powerful there will be a point when mobile devices have enough processing power to replace notebooks. And that day is not too far away anymore. Two years, perhaps three?

Once this happens it will trigger a third revolution which requires operating systems that give users the same comfort as today while the device is used in a mobile scenario and the same power and flexibility when used in a desktop scenario. It is going to be interesting to see how mobile operating systems will adapt to this. I very much welcome Canonical's and Jolla's push into the mobile space because I can't imagine using Android for my privacy and confidentiality needs on such a unified device.

In early January I've updated my Raspberry Owncloud installation from Ownclud 5 to Owncloud 6. So far, everything continues to run smoothly and I noticed some nice improvements. In Owncloud 5 and before, using the web based address book was a bit of a pain as the icons for each address book entry was requested separately and the Raspberry Pi is a bit slow to respond. This has much improved in Owncloud 6, they seem to be all requested and loaded together now, which significantly reduces the load time.

Further, OC 6 introduces thumbnails for files which are generated from their actual content. Sounds nice but on a processing power limited Raspberry Pi it slows things down. Fortunately there's a configuration option to disable thumbnail use. So as far as the address book is concerned OC 6 is faster than it's predecessor and all other functions have not slowed down, despite the massive code increase of OC 6 over OC 5.

What I'd like to see in OC 7 is some optimization for processing power limited systems as I imagine that many people use it on Raspberry Pi's at home as the device is small, cheap and fan-less.

Which makes me wonder: Who of you reading this blog is using Owncloud as well?

So far my main phone I have in use is not LTE capable. While I am in cities I do not mind, the 3G networks in Germany are fast enough so there is not a lot of difference to LTE. But there is one big advantage LTE phones now have in Germany, fast Internet connectivity in the countryside.

Due to spectrum auction rules, network operators had to deploy LTE on 800 MHz in the German countryside first and where only allowed to use this frequency range in cities once rural areas where covered. As a consequence there are a lot of places today with LTE + GSM coverage but without UMTS.

That means that my 2G/3G phone drops down to unusably slow GSM/EDGE in the countryside while my LTE phone in the other pocket continues to enjoy hyperfast connectivity. I've set the 'almost' in brackets in the title because I have a way out: Wi-Fi tethering. Whenever I am in a place with LTE only coverage, Wi-Fi tethering from my LTE phone provides connectivity for my 3G phone. This works very well in practice and the battery of the LTE phone powers the internal Wi-Fi access point for around 8 hours. That's usually more than enough. Agreed, it's a kludge but it works.