WirelessMoves

Here's two links today that give a very interesting overview of GSM, UMTS and LTE coverage in Germany today from two of the four network operators. I've chosen to link those two, because Vodafone and T-Mobile have built up significant LTE coverage over the past 18 months, especially in rural areas to bring high speed Internet coverage to small towns and villages. This was part of the license conditions for the 800 MHz digital dividend band and as can be seen on the maps it has born fruit.

On the T-Mobile map one can also see LTE coverage that will be switched on soon, most of it in big cities this time. The special thing about the Vodafone map is that UMTS and LTE coverage can be shown separately or together on the map and it's interesting to observe how LTE fills the gaps in UMTS coverage. 

I've been saving screenshots those coverage maps for years and it is quite interesting to see how 3G coverage expanded over the years. Initial 3G deployments looked quite different from the initial LTE deployments now as at that time, it was the big cities that were covered first rather than rural areas. This time around, license conditions have made the picture different and also, 3G in big cities with HSPA+, 64QAM and Dual Carrier extensions still has ample capacity to serve the needs there so there was no disadvantage to go for rural coverage first where often, only 2G was available.

About three to four years ago, 3G sticks for notebooks and netbooks started to take off and I assumed at the time that pretty quickly they would move inside the devices as mini-PCI adapters and use internal antennas wrapped around the display which would make reception even better. But to my surprise this hasn't really happened and few notebook are sold with a 3G card inside. Devices with antennas inside and SIM card slots waiting for a 3G card to be inserted are pretty rare as well. So what happened?

Perhaps there are several reasons for it: Notebooks for the masses go out for less than 600 euros for notebooks in many cases and less than 250 euros for netbooks. Adding a 3G card or even just antennas raise the price and make an offer less attractive compared to the competition. I wonder by how much the price would be raised!? Go to a supermarket in countries like Germany, Austria and some others and you can buy an entry level 3G USB stick for 20 to 30 euros, with a prepaid SIM card included and a couple of days or even a month of free surfing. Sure, the offer is subsidized by network operators but it's prepaid so it's unlikely a lot of money has gone into it. But USB sticks are simple, plug and play, no testing with a notebook whether it works or not like it is probably would have to be done for mini-PCI cards, etc. so I understand why it hasn't happened so far.

Another remedy might be tethering with mobile devices over WiFi which many smartphones offer today. Saves one the trouble of getting an extra SIM card and paying twice for data service, especially if only used occasionally or only lightly, e.g. during the daily commute where data intensive applications such as music and video streaming are not really an application anyway.

Yes, I know, as so often I am an exception but I would spend a few euros to get a mini-PCI 3G card for my netbook because that 3G USB dongle is just not really convenient…

 

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how I managed to rescue data for a friend from Delicious which has changed owners and had a deadline for migrating the data that not everybody seems to have made. But it was only half a victory because I used to use Delicious myself and ever since it changed hands I was not happy with how the new owner developed the service. I frequently had to struggle with login problems which made adding new bookmarks a hassle and going back to the collection to search for a bookmark an equally uneasy process as well. Time to do something about it I finally thought over the weekend and look for a new place for my bookmarks.

The main reasons I had my bookmarks on Delicious was because I could access them from different devices, a typical cloud based service and obviously any other solution would have to do that as well. Recently, Firefox has also added this capability with its "sync" service. What's even better here is that the copy stored on the web is fully encrypted and the encryption key is with me. In other words, neither Mozilla nor anyone else can look into the encrypted container which is unlike many other services which promise you to encrypt the data for you but at the same time have the key to decrypt the data as well. Makes me wonder what the point of such encryption is in the first place.

So by migrating from Delicious to Firefox sync I would get two things at once, privacy of my data and a usable, cross device bookmarking service. But there is a little catch when migrating the bookmarks. Delicious does have the option to export bookmarks together with tags. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't like the format and only imports the bookmarks but not the tags. Not a good thing because it's the tags that make the link collection useful. This is a tough one but I finally found this page which offers a script that converts the Delicious output to a format Firefox can understand.

The converted file can then be read into Firefox via the "restore" functionality. The catch with this one is that it overwrites the bookmarks that are stored locally. The solution is to export the local bookmarks into an HTML file and then import the ex-Delicious bookmarks via the "restore" function. Afterward, those bookmarks have to be moved to a separate folder and then the "import HTML" function restores the local bookmarks.

The whole process took me the better part of two hours to figure out but I'm glad I've done it. Not only is my data secure and private now with a copy in the cloud that only I have the ciphering keys for but syncing to a new device running Firefox (e.g. a pad) only takes a couple of seconds.

Excellent!

This week, the telecoms press spread a rumor that 3 Austria is in the final stages of negotiation with Orange Austria about a takeover. Interesting news but nobody really spends much thought if the Austrian regulator would actually allow such a move!?

In effect, such a takeover would reduce the number of independent networks from a healthy four to only three. Can the wireless market be healthy and competitive with only three network operators? If you don't hear anything about this deal anymore than I guess the regulator's answer was no.

Should they allow it, the consequences would be quite far reaching as once a network is gone it is quite unlikely a competitor would be interested in errecting a fourth one from scratch again, as the age for new wireless network operators is over.

It wouldn't be the first time a regulator said no to such a move, see Switzerland for example were a similar was just stopped recently at a much later stage by the regulator.

Any idea how much bandwidth a Youtube stream requires? Me neither so I recently took some time to have a closer look. Before reading on, take a guess.

Obviously, Youtube does not stream videos in the low compression format in which they are usually uploaded. In a test I did, the 1280x720p video I took with my smartphone had a data rate of about 11 MBit/s and a file size of around 45 megabytes for 32 seconds. Once uploaded and converted by Youtube the HD version of the video (720p) streams at around 2.7 MBit/s and has a total file size of around 11 megabytes. That's the format used by high resolution smartphones today. The default format (480p) version of my test video streams at around 1.2 MBit/s. I've also compared it to other professional content such as movie trailers and the data rates are about the same.

Interesting numbers and the next higher resolution is already in sight, 1280p. As for know, however, that is still rather the exception.

Lightreading recently reported that US cable network operator Cox has given up its plans for wireless after having bought LTE spectrum for $550 million previously and launching as an MVNO on Sprint's network about a year ago. That was a short and costly trip to wireless land.

It seems that it becomes harder and harder to get established as an additional wireless network operator in the competitive landscape today where your competition already has installed nationwide networks and a solid subscriber base. Other examples I can think of with high plans and quick folds or non-delivery afterwards were a number of companies in Germany who bought WIMAX spectrum a couple of years ago but never made it to a real roll-out. I guess similar things happened in other countries a few years back as well.

A current new startup that I keep watching closely is Free in France, a DSL network operator currently trying to establish itself as the fourth network operator in a not so competitive wireless market. But building a network that customers actually accept or partnering with another incumbent until the network is built out sufficiently are difficult tasks. I wish them all the luck because France could use some wireless competition from the customer's point of view. And after all, every rule needs an exception!

Rather than new network operators appearing on the scene the opposite has been happening in recent years with some incumbents either merging or getting permission to do some form of network sharing beyond just using the same towers. For both regulators and network operators this is a tricky thing to get right because once networks are merged its difficult to impossible to reverse. Also, once networks are merged but companies are still separate, strategies for network evolution are closely linked, perhaps too closely to differentiate or to do what a company really likes to do. Let's hope such moves do not fire back for the regulator, for the companies involved and least of all, for the users. In wireless, four (real networks) seems to be the lucky number, not three, when it comes to a balance of good prices, service and coverage on the one side and making a profit on the other.

Austria has long been the country with one of the lowest prices in mobile in the western hemisphere and give you a pretty good idea of how things might look like in other countries in a couple of years from now. The latest offer there from one network operator is 10 GB of data per month for 9 euros on a prepaid SIM card (with automatic monthly renewal). Data rates are throttled to 4 MBit/s in the downlink direction and 2 MBit/s in the uplink direction but that is more than enough for most things. And on top they are explicitly mentioning the possibility to use the SIM in a 3G dongle bought elsewhere. Makes you think when you see tariffs and the terms and conditions in other countries…

One of the good things of most Linux based distributions is the central software catalog and combined update capability so the user doesn't have to update different programs from different resources or be bothered by programs individually to start or complete an update (like in Windows for example). While this is ideal and convenient for most users, the downside is that if the distribution decides that a package is in maintenance and security update mode only, there are no feature updates. One of those programs for me is Wireshark in which, over the last one and a half years, a number of interesting decoding packages for GSM have been added which are not available over my default Ubuntu 10.04 software updater.

Some fast developing programs such as Firefox have Linux binaries for download and can thus be kept up to date by the user if he wishes so in a pretty straight forward way. Wireshark, on the other hand only comes as source code for Linux so you have to compile it yourself if you want to have the latest and greatest version. So far I always shied away from this, too much work, too much hassle, too many unknowns. But these days the "feature pressure" became too big so I used an Ubuntu in a virtual machine for a trial and error compile. Turns out it was not as difficult as I thought but not straight forward either.

After downloading the sources and putting them in a folder in my home directory I checked the web for compile instructions and found them here. I guess things are made easier if you already have a relatively recent Wireshark version installed via the standard software repository so the general procedure only consists of the following three shell commands:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make

I had to run the process a number of times because I didn't have two software components installed for the scripts. One was gtk+ where the script wanted a version 2.4 or higher. Unfortunately, Ubuntu 10.04 only has a lower version number available in the software repository. So I installed that and it worked fine as well. After that all you need is some time depending on the speed of your CPU. Once done, wireshark can be started from the directory with ./wireshark (don't forget the ./, otherwise the old version is started from the default path).

And finally, the directory that contains the Wireshark executable and can be copied to other machines running Ubuntu 10.04 so no compile process is necessary there. Excellent!

As a frequent worldwide traveler I find it quite annoying when I come to big cities (such as that hosting the next summer Olympics for example) and the tube system is lacking wireless network coverage. The issue is more prevalent in some countries than in others and now a recent study by the New Cities Foundation on where tube systems have coverage sheds some interesting details on this topic. According to their results South Korea and China have 100% network coverage in big city tube systems, followed closely by Japan with 87.5% and Asia as a whole with 84.4%. Europe is pretty much down in the list at 56% only trailed by a few such as the US where it is even worse. A result I would not have quite expected. I guess the message is clear: European and US cities beware, you are by far surpassed by your Asian competitors!

The project on Internet connection sharing over cellular networks during meetings I reported on in two previous posts is not quite over yet and I've been working on refining my setup ever since. One thing that often goes wrong in non-optimized hardware setups is the number of devices the built-in DHCP server can give out IP addresses to. In many home grown routers this is actually quite limited, even if the DHCP server range can be specified from .1 to .254. To find out exactly where the limit is, here's a script I've came up with that can be run under Linux and will send 268 requests to the DHCP server, each with a different Ethernet hardware address. Some routers stop giving out IP addresses after 50 leases, some after 60 and only few go to the full range.

#!/bin/bash

for l in {1..99}
do
  sudo ifconfig eth0 down
  sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 70:00:00:00:00:$l
  sudo dhclient -r
  sleep 2
  sudo ifconfig eth0 up
  sudo dhclient
  sleep 3
  echo $l " "
  ifconfig | grep "inet addr:192.168."
  ifconfig | grep "HWaddr"
done

for l in {1..99}
do
  sudo ifconfig eth0 down
  sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 70:00:00:00:01:$l
  sudo dhclient -r
  sleep 2
  sudo ifconfig eth0 up
  sudo dhclient
  sleep 3
  echo $l " "
  ifconfig | grep "inet addr:192.168."
  ifconfig | grep "HWaddr"
done

for l in {1..70}
do
  sudo ifconfig eth0 down
  sudo ifconfig eth0 hw ether 70:00:00:00:02:$l
  sudo dhclient -r
  sleep 2
  sudo ifconfig eth0 up
  sudo dhclient
  sleep 3
  echo $l " "
  ifconfig | grep "inet addr:192.168."
  ifconfig | grep "HWaddr"
done

Note: Only run this script on your own setup that you can reset afterwards as once the script is through the DHCP server won't give out further IP addresses. Something you don't want to have in a life network…