Recently, I attended a huge fair with 10.000 people crammed into a 16.000 m2 hall that had indoor LTE coverage from 3 network operators and little Wifi for public use. From a mobile network point of view it doesn’t get much ‘worse’ than this so I spent some time to have a look how one … Continue reading LTE Congestion Behavior – Part 2
When I’m looking into the specs to get some details on basic LTE features, I tend to look at ‘old’ 3GPP specification documents as more often than not, things are much easier to find there than in the latest and greatest versions of the same document. Here’s an interesting example: 3GPP 36.133 on LTE Radio … Continue reading 3GPP Specification Bloat
Unfortunately I could not come to cccamp#19 so I missed a lot of fun. Fortunately, people shared a lot of technical details online so I was able to pull together a number of interesting details about the different microwave backhaul links that were put in place for the event as a backup to the cross … Continue reading State of Microwave Backhaul – Part 1
A few weeks ago, two US network operators have launched 5G in the Chicago area, just when I happened to be there for a week. While I don’t have a 5G device that supports US deployments yet, I expected that, perhaps as a side effect, there would also be a significant LTE deployment. However, I … Continue reading A Look At LTE Deployment North of Chicago – Part 1
When I was recently asked what the power consumption of a typical cell site is I had general idea but decided to find out some more details and to set things into perspective. According to sources here and here, a typical 3 sector base station site with several LTE carriers on air draws anywhere between … Continue reading Cell Site Power Consumption
Back in 2016 I noted on this site that one German network operator had by that time deployed 50 MHz worth of LTE in the center of Cologne where I live. I was impressed! Others have also not been idle since then and when I was in Paris recently, I noticed that Orange also has … Continue reading The State of Carrier Aggregation in Paris
tl;dr: Over the past weeks, I’ve put together a Firefox add-on for SSL certificate pinning so I would notice if ever a man-in-the-middle would use forged certificates to spy on me when I interact with my home servers, banking websites, and so on. I feel a lot safer now again! You can find it here … Continue reading Certificate Pinning Is Back In Firefox!
In this day and age it rarely happens that I’m in libraries with poor Internet access. In most cases, library officials have recognized the signs of the times and installed a usable Eduroam Wifi network on their premises. The University of Vienna is a good example. But there are unfortunate exceptions as well. One of … Continue reading How To Tether When Library Wifi is Poor
Another year is coming to an end again so it’s time once more to have a look at which things have moved me this year and how technology has moved forward, or not. 5G – 5G – 5G If you visit this site every now and then you have probably noticed that 2018 has been … Continue reading Things That Moved Me In 2018
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 … Continue reading Thinking the Unthinkable: The End of Circuit Switching