WirelessMoves

Once upon a time the Internet was bidirectional and everyone could run a server at their end. Unfortunately, these days are long gone and many ISPs today, especially cable providers, do not assign a public IPv4 address to their customers. Not even when you ask them nicely. Not even for money, unless you are a business customer who is willing to pay through the nose for the privilege. Fortunately, there is a way to run servers at home and make them accessible to the outside world and an easy one at that. The following text and shell commands are from a talk I gave at GPN19 (in German).

Continue reading How To Run A Server At Home Without An IPv4 Address

So far I’ve always made a quick and approximate calculation when somebody asked me what the theoretical peak data rate of 5G NR would be for a given bandwidth. But there is a more scientific way to do this as 3GPP has put a formula together to include all relevant factors in the calculation. Using this formula it is then possible to not only calculate the theoretical peak throughput but also what can be achieved in realistic transmission conditions. As the number of parameters that go into the calculation is quite lengthy a number of people have made online calculators available. Here’s a good example.

Continue reading 5G NR Throughput Calculator

After trying to remember when I used the Internet for the first time in my previous article on Gopher and the early World Wide Web, and coming to the conclusion that it was in 1994, I’ve then taken the next step and tried to remember when I actually published my first website. So here’s the story.

Continue reading Looking Back: The Year I Published My First Website

I’m one of those people who run their own XMPP server because I like my privacy. In my case I use Prosody and by default it communicates directly with the client apps such as ‘Conversations’ or ‘Pix-Art Messenger’ on Android. Unfortunately, iOS is much less cooperative and in the name of power saving, cuts the connection to clients a few minutes after they have gone to the background. Sending messages to these clients then requires the use of Apple’s push service to wake up the client app, e.g. the Chatsecure app, so it can pull the message from the server. So how is that done in practice?

Continue reading Configuring Prosody for iOS and Chatsecure Push

Heise news reports that around this time 25 years ago, Commodore, the company behind the legendary C64 and Amiga computers filed for bankruptcy. I still remember that day as I was sad on the one hand but on the other didn’t care very much anymore as well.

Continue reading 25 Years Ago Commodore Filed For Bankruptcy

Back in 2016 I wrote an article in which I calculated the number of users that are served by an LTE base station site. I made my calculations based on the number of base station sites and subscribers in Germany that are publicly available. My conclusion was that an LTE base station site serves about 750 subscribers. A few days ago I came across this presentation by Nokia given at Aalto university in October 2018 which has interesting numbers on this topic as well.

Continue reading Number of Subscribers per LTE Base Station

Further and further back I go to find out why things in computing today are the way they are. The latest book I have read on computing history is actually a bit away from computing and is about the development about the transistor, microchips and finally, microprocessors. One person that significantly stands out in this story is Robert Noyce and Leslie Berlin’s book ‘The Man Behind The Microchip‘ is a fascinating biography of a man who’s ideas have changed the world in a big way with something very little.

Continue reading Book Review: The Man Behind The Microchip

Back in October 2016, I ran my first Wifi 802.11ac speed measurement at home. At my desk with one wall between me and the Wifi Access point plus a nasty corner, I could get up to 368 Mbit/s versus a ‘measly’ 70 Mbit/s with my 802.11n based Lenovo X230 notebook I had at the time. What I didn’t do back then was to note the top speed I could get when I was closer to the Wifi access point. Now that I’ve upgraded to a Lenovo X250 with an 802.11ac Wifi card built-in and supporting access points popping-up in many places, it was time to see what the practical maximum could be.

Continue reading Reaching Almost 600 Mbit/s with 802.11ac

A couple of weeks ago I got away very impressed and entertained by ‘We are Bob‘, a crazy story about a programming whiz kid that gets run over by a car and waking up a hundred years into the future, not in his own body, but as a replicant in a sophisticated computer. He’s then pressed to become the brain of an ‘unmanned’ interstellar probe and leaves the solar system just before mankind is about to blow itself up. And that was just the beginning of the story. I very much enjoyed it so I couldn’t wait to read the second part of the trilogy by Dennis Taylor ‘For We Are Many’.

Continue reading Book Review: For We Are Many

I was quite surprised when I read that tomorrow, in an attempt to further push the single EU telecommunication market, a cap will come into effect for fixed and mobile phone calls from a user’s home country to other EU countries. I was aware that debates about this were going on but I had no idea this was already decided. How could I have missed that!?

Continue reading Price Cap For Calling to Other EU Countries Comes Into Effect Tomorrow!