WirelessMoves – Page 6 – My Thoughts on the Evolution of Wireless, FOSS and the Past, Present and Future of Computing

W11 – Part 1 – Virtualbox: Install Windows 11 on a TPM-less Host

As you probably know, I’m firmly rooted in the Linux camp. Still, for some work related applications I have to use MS Windows. But at least it’s in a virtual machine… For that purpose, I have a Linux based server at home that runs, among many other things, a Windows 10 installation in a Virtualbox VM. The problem: In 2025, support for Windows 10 ends, so an upgrade to Windows 11 is required. Unfortunately, upgrading W10 to W11 in the VM is not straight forward, as the server is 8 years old, and MS thinks the hardware is too old for W11. Particularly, the server does not have a Trusted Platform Module, which is one of the preconditions to upgrade W10 to W11. Eventually, I managed to update the VM, but it was quite an uphill battle. As there were too many unknowns, I thought I’d start to get some experience by installing W11 in a VM from scratch and then build on the knowledge gained from this. As the whole exercise was quite a bit of a learning exercise, I’ll split the topic into a number of blog posts. Enjoy the ride!

The Unused Fixed Line At Home

A quick self observation post today: When I initially ordered my Internet DSL fixed line at home a decade ago, it came of course with a fixed telephony line. Initially, telephony came as a separate ISDN signal that the DSL router then converted to wireless DECT, for which I bought a nice DECT phone. Time moved on, and a few years ago, the good old ISDN exchanges were decommissioned, and my fixed line was converted to SIP over IP over DSL.

Who’s Got the Most n78?

I live in Germany, and I’m used to the situation that the national regulator decided to only auction 300 MHz of the 400 MHz of spectrum available in the 3.5 GHz band (n78) back in 2019. As there were 4 applications, this meant that nobody could get the full 5G channel bandwidth of 100 MHz. At the time, two operators got 90 MHz each, while the others got 50 and 90 MHz respectively. Quite a bit of spectrum you might say, but only as long as you don’t look how other countries handled that part of the spectrum.

Changing my Color Profile – What!?

I recently bought another Lenovo T14 Gen 4 notebook for redundancy purposes and migrated my NVMe to the new hardware. Things looked good at first, but I soon noticed that the yellow color on some web pages looked a bit odd. At first, I didn’t mind but at some point, I decided to have a closer look.

AT&T Quits LTE NB-IoT

In an interesting post over at RCR Wireless, I noticed today that AT&T is about to shut-down their LTE NB-IoT network. And not only in a couple of years from now. No, the full shutdown is scheduled for Q1/2025. So surely there will be a new and shiny replacement technology in place? Hm, no, not really. The post mentions that customers should move over to LTE CAT-M, but that’s hardly a replacement for embedded and energy efficient devices that require only little data. If you read between the lines of the PR bla bla, I guess AT&T hasn’t seen much uptake of the technology it had in its network since 2019, and is not expecting any significant further uptake in the future. Which makes me wonder how NB-IoT fares in other parts of the world!? Perhaps AT&T’s move is also an indication why there is no real successor technology in 5G NR to NB-IoT. Be that as it may, I’m a bit sad to see an interesting 4G cellular technology being shut-down by a US operator that was so much different from all the high-speed network technology that was deployed in the same timeframe.

NVMe to USB Adapters – More than 10 Gbit/s Usable in 2024?

In the previous post, I had a look at the different speed classes of NVMe to USB adapters available on the market in 2024. I have a number of 10 Gbit/s adapters, but I’d be quite tempted to get one of the higher speed classes (20 or 40 Gbit/s) for particular applications, even though the price difference is quite significant. But it turned out that cp and rsync, which I often use to duplicate large file systems, can’t take advantage of faster adapters.

NVMe to USB Adapter Prices in 2024

Most mid-range notebooks in 2024 now come with USB 3.2 Gen 2 support, which means the maximum data transfer rate is about 10 Gbit/s. While that is nice, it’s even nicer to see that more expensive notebooks now also support USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 with 20 Gbit/s, and even USB 4 / Thunderbolt 4 with 40 Gbit/s. (see here for details). Higher speeds are particularly useful for copying large amounts of data from one NVMe to another, as even low end SSDs support datarates of well over 1 GB/s, i.e. over 10 Gbit/s. When it comes to prices for NVMe to USB adapters, there is a large spread in the market, depending which speed a product supports. So I thought I’d document the current status here to see how things develop in the future.

London Tube – LTE/NR 3.5 GHz Deployment – Part 4

In the previous 3 parts of this series, I’ve had a look at the superb LTE/5G network coverage that has been installed in the tube in central London in 2024. One main question that had to remain unanswered at the time was how much capacity has actually been put into place. On one end of possible options, all four network operators could share bandwidth and many stations and tunnels in between could use the same cells. On the other end of possible options, each network operator could use its own spectrum, and stations and tunnels would be covered individually. When I was recently back in London, I took a few hours to have a closer look.

UK Network Coverage in Busy Places – Some Thoughts

In the past 3 posts I’ve had a high level look at the superb new London tube network coverage. With data rates of 500 Mbps without any special setup, it is nothing short of breathtaking. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for other busy places in London.

London Tube – LTE/NR 3.5 GHz Deployment – Part 3

Another day, another little trace session in the London tube when coming home from a event in the evening at 9 pm. In Part 2 of this series I’ve taken a look at one network operator’s LTE/5G coverage on London’s Central underground line and came away quite impressed. 5G NR n78 on the platforms with massive bandwidth, and 5G NR n8 together with LTE in the tunnels. From what I can tell by press reports, the cellular network is deployed by a 3rd party company, so there was the odd chance that all network operators would use the same spectrum. This would of course significantly limit the capacity. So I decided to have another look with a SIM card of a different operator.