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

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.

London Tube – LTE/NR 3.5 GHz Deployment – Part 2

When I was recently in London I was delighted to see that LTE/5G network coverage has finally come to first parts of the London tube. I didn’t have a lot of time or space to get my tracing equipment out, but I could nevertheless get a glimpse on some of the basic parameters on my mobile device.

London Tube – LTE/NR 3.5 GHz Deployment – Part 1

For the last 20 years, I’ve been wondering when mobile network coverage would finally come to the London tube. Together with Berlin, London was/is one of the last remaining major cities in Europe I have visited in recent years without decent mobile network coverage in underground public transportation. But it seems that the people who have seen problems rather than solutions have finally retired, and LTE / 5G network rollout in the London tube has finally started.

The Blog Has Moved From Finland to France – Number 5

In case you seem to experience a déjà-vu right now, it is not your imagination, this is the second instantiation of this post. More about this below. But first, here we go, I’ve done it again: For the fifth time in its almost 20 year history, this blog has moved again to another physical location.

Installing KVM / QEMU on Ubuntu 24.04 and fixing the NAT

Once I had my Scaleway bare metal server up and running to my liking (see my post here), the next step in the process was to get KVM / QEMU working so I could transfer a number of virtual machines from my previous server to this equipment. One of the nice things of moving servers is to install the latest software version of products, in this case Ubuntu 24.04 and KVM/QEMU to escape eventual technical debt. On the other hand, I am always surprised when things do not work out of the box. After all, it was so easy last time on the previous version…