WirelessMoves

I can still remember that as a teenager in the 1980s I used a typewriter for school and to document things. This was the time before I got my first home computer and printer after which I don’t think I used the typewriter much if at all anymore and did all of my ‘word processing’ on my C64 and attached needle printer. I can hardly imagine how it must have been before that time when people wrote books and other long documents without this truly revolutionizing functionality.

But when did this all start? After all, when I started to use word processing on a home computer, it was already a mass market application. So I started to investigate a bit.

Continue reading Some Thoughts On The Advent of Word Processing

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 Resource Management. In 3GPP Release 8, which is one version after the initial Rel. 7 LTE specification and published in 2013, the document has 339 pages. The current Release 15 version published in July 2019 has 3602 pages. Woah!

Continue reading 3GPP Specification Bloat

Once upon a time, a hotel chain thought it would be a good idea to sabotage Wifi hotspots of their customers. The FCC didn’t like it at all and stepped in and the practice fortunately ceased. But others may still think this is a good idea and could actually get away with it unless access points and mobile devices would start implementing Protected Management Frames (PMF). This was all back in 2015 and 2016 but since then I haven’t seen access points that actually implement the protection in the wild. But now my Fritzbox 7590 Wifi access point at home supports the feature so I had a look how clients behave with and without PMF activated.

Continue reading Wifi Protected Management Frames – In The Wild!

Recently, Tefficient had an interesting post on Twitter in which they stated that in Austria, mobile network traffic is now 53% of the fixed line traffic in the country. An incredible number, could it really be true? And if so, how does that compare to mobile network traffic in other countries? To find out, I had a look at Austria’s telecom regulator report for 2018 and compared the values to those from Germany’s telecom regulator report.

Continue reading One Third Of All Internet Traffic In Austria Is Now Over Cellular

Earlier in October I spent a weekend in Berlin again to be part of the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin. This year, I did not bring along an exhibit or give a talk but rather decided to help a bit with organizing the event. A most gratifying experience and of course there was enough time to talk to a lot of people and learn new things. Here are some impressions.

Continue reading Some Thoughts on the Vintage Computing Festival Berlin 2019

When I recently flew from Frankfurt to Hong Kong with Cathay Pacific, I flew on two different planes with two different Internet providers. On the outbound leg, I was on a Boeing 777 that was equipped with a system operated by Gogo wireless, well known for providing  in-flight Internet access for many airlines in the US. On the return trip I was on an Airbus A350 and Internet access there was provided with a Panasonic system. The experiences could not have been more different.

Continue reading Gogo vs. Panasonic on Planes

Ever since I can remember, my wireless mice came with a USB dongle. They shrunk in size over the years so this straight forward approach has served me well. But the number of USB ports on notebooks is on a steep decline. Put recent security vulnerabilities on top that have been found in proprietary protocols and the manufacturer’s inability to deliver a fix that addresses them all made me look for a wireless mouse that uses Bluetooth and thus no longer requires an extra USB dongle. Obviously it has to work with Ubuntu Linux.

Continue reading Ubuntu and Bluetooth Mice – The Cherry MW 8 ADV

When I was recently on a long-haul flight I accidentally didn’t activate flight mode on my smartphone and to my surprise the device registered to an on-board 3G network of AeroMobile once we were at cruising altitude. I was really glad my home network operator of choice has a landing page to block mobile data outside the EU until I confirm because as I already discussed here, 2G/3G/LTE mobile network use on planes and ships is still super expensive. Calling a price of close to one Euro per 50 kb of data ‘modern piracy’ is probably an understatement.

Continue reading AeroMobile 3G on Planes

First Wifi products are now coming to the market that support WPA-3 personal mode authentication and ciphering key exchange so I thought it would be a good idea to have a closer look at how it works and why an update was necessary.

To answer the last question first: WPA-2 PSK (Pre-Shared Key) uses the Wifi password as basis for all authentication and encryption exchanges between Wifi access point and clients. Many networks only use short and thus very weak passwords, and brute forcing them offline without interaction with the network has become quite feasible with current generation computing hardware. WPA-3 tries to address this issue with a new authentication scheme referred to as ‘Simultaneous Authentication of Equals’ (SAE). It is based on Diffie Hellman Elliptic Curve Public/Private keypair generation algorithms that are also used for generating ciphering keys for secure HTTPS connections today.

The mathematical details of the process can be found in RFC 7664 and a good higher level description can be found here. Still, it took me quite a few hours to understand the principles, so I though I’d assemble a less mathematically focused description on the basics of  WPA-3 SAE and how it is used in practice:

Continue reading What Is Wifi WPA-3 Personal Mode Authentication?

Over the past weeks I’ve noticed a few articles, posts and videos on the net that were looking at first 5G deployments in the wild and were commenting on the seemingly limited range of the 3.5 GHz band that is used for 5G NR. Some people noted that only 200m from the base station they could no longer use 5G and fell back to LTE. Therefore, they concluded, the range of the n78 frequency band must be very limited. But is this really so?

Continue reading The Range of 5G Band n78