5G RRC Protocol And How It Compares to 4G RRC

Recently I’ve been looking a bit at the 5G NR Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol in 3GPP TS 38.311 to get an idea how it is structured and how it compares to the LTE RRC protocol specified in 3GPP TS 36.331. As Ralf points out in the comments below (thanks very much!) some parts of it are already used today to embed 5G configuration information in 4G RRC messages for EN-DC, while other parts will become relevant with 5G NR Standalone, i.e. once a 5G core network is available and devices and the gNBs have implemented standalone operation.

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Interesting Insights from the EU’s Roaming Report

A couple of weeks ago, Heise had a post on the newly published EU roaming report. Via this page you can get to the actual document that indeed has many interesting insights into pricing, cost and use of roaming in the EU before and after roaming charges became a thing of the past in June 2017. The document has 98 pages full of insights and here are the points that I found particularly interesting.

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Congested Peering and Transit

While I was investigating potential congestion issues in the roaming backhaul link of mobile networks I noticed again once more that this is by far not the only place where network operators are not providing enough capacity during busy hours in the evening. Another unfortunate example are fixed line access networks. Here are two examples over which I trip frequently.

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Roaming Interface Congestion?

When I was recently in Austria I noticed that in the evening hours, the superb network speed I got over the LTE network in a town in the mountains at the place I was staying went from 40-50 MBit/s during the daytime to just 2-3 Mbit/s in the evening. Typical dissapointing busy hour overload at the LTE cell site due to underdimensioning I thought at first. But then I noticed that this was not quite the case.

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IPv6 While Roaming

In the previous post I had a closer look at the ipv6-only APN of my mobile network operator of choice and how that brings me a step closer to the future of the Internet as it should be. By configuring and activating an additional APN profile, a device can instruct the network to only assign an IPv6 address and to perform DNS64 to reach IPv4 only hosts on the Internet. It works great while I’m in my home country but a bit of care needs to be taken to configure the APN profile properly for roaming.

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Linux BIOS Updates Made (Even) Easier – Part 2

Image: Firmware update in a Linux shellIn the first part I’ve taken a look at how to update the BIOS of my Lenovo notebooks that run Linux without burning that ‘other-OS’ installer to a CD-ROM. As I use somewhat older Lenovo notebooks, mostly X250’s, X230’s and T430’s, the best option was to convert the CD-ROM ISO images and write them to a USB Flash stick. For newer Lenovo and other manufacturer’s devices, however, there’s an even better way to do this. Continue reading Linux BIOS Updates Made (Even) Easier – Part 2

Linux BIOS Updates Made Easier – Part 1

Image: Flashing in progressTriggered by a survey on Mastodon on how often people upgrade the UEFI BIOS in their PC or notebook I thought it would be a good time to have a go at it again with some of my machines at home. The thing with UEFI BIOS updates of my Lenovo notebooks is that update utilities are only offered for Mac and Windows. For Linux and other operating systems, they offer bootable CD-ROM ISO images. Srsly? I have to admit that’s a bit too much hassle unless it is really urgent. But then I noticed that there are actually two methods to get around burning a CD-ROM to update the BIOS.

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