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.
Continue reading Interesting Insights from the EU’s Roaming Report
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.
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.
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.
For many years, I’ve been using IPv4v6 dualstack on my mobile devices to communicate over IPv6 with servers that also support it. Now T-Mobile Germany (Deutsche Telekom) has taken the next step and offers IPv6-only connectivity over which IPv4 hosts can still be reached.
All right, I am impressed because the Linux Firmware Updater (fwupd) does not only update embedded Firmware in my notebooks as described in the previous post, but can actually also update the firmware of USB devices!
Continue reading Linux BIOS Updates Even Update My Mouse – Part 3
In 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
Triggered 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.
Yes, I am well over 3 years late to the party but I just recently discovered an interesting podcast that blends computing history with today’s coding and nerdiness of all kinds. It’s called ‘Command Line Heroes‘, narrated by Saron Yitbarek and is produced by Red Hat.
I can still remember the days when mobile phones were a hot item on the list of any pickpocket. Protruding out of pockets, easily stolen, and easily reset and sold. But it seems these days are over.