WirelessMoves

So here we are in the fall of 2019. 5G networks have started around the globe and pretty much all of them use high-band spectrum at 3.5 GHz (band n78). US operators are experimenting with 2.5 GHz and mmWave spectrum in combination with an LTE anchor cell. The anchor cell is usually either at 1.8 GHz (band 3) or 2.6 GHz (band 7) and perhaps in some cases also on the 800 MHz low-band (band 20). That is all nice and well but 5G on 3.5 GHz won’t cut it when it comes to nationwide coverage. For that, 5G also needs to use the mid- and low-bands. But how do we get there?

Continue reading How To Get Nationwide 5G Coverage and a 5G Core Network

Already back in 2009 (!), I wrote a blog post on LTE’s TTI-bundling feature. It was supposed to be used to improve cell edge scenarios when a device’s uplink power would not be sufficient anymore. In particular it was seen to improve VoLTE speech quality. Quite a bit of thinking ahead because we were far away from VoLTE in practice back then. Over the years I haven’t seen TTI Bundling in the wild until recently.

Continue reading LTE TTI Bundling in the Wild

When I was recently in the US, I had the opportunity to drive a Toyota RAV4 that came equipped with semi-autonomous driving features. A welcome opportunity to experience first hand over a few hours in dense metropolitan areas and overland routes the current state of driver assistance technology.

Continue reading My First Semi-Autonomous Drive Experience

For months I am trying to get through an amazing book ‘The Dream Machine’, a biography of computing pioneer J. C. R. Licklider. The ‘problem’ with the book is that it is so packed with interesting stories about computing and networking from the 1950s to the 1980s, that there is hardly a page at which I don’t deviate to get some more background information. I am about halfway through and again got stuck when I started some background research on the early days of the Arpanet. This is when I stumbled over an incredibly interesting video I thought I should mention here.

Continue reading When Wideband Was 50 kbit/s

Over the years, USB had been upgraded and upgraded and upgraded and it’s easy to loose sight of how fast in theory and in practice a particular version of the USB standard could be. So here’s a quick cheat sheet with the theoretical maximum speed of different USB versions:

Continue reading USB Speed – Cheat Sheet

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