Cellular IoT – Part 8 – A Whitepaper and 3GPP Spec References

Over the past months, 3GPP was quite busy to ensure the NB-IoT made it into Release 13 before time ran out. So far, I’ve been looking into CRs and the Work Item description to get an idea of what is standardized because the Release 13 specification documents themselves did not yet contain NB-IoT content. Fortunately this has no changed in the latest edition of the documents and there and one company even pushed out a whitepaper to give an overview.

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Nobody Calls Me… Because I Have A Foreign Number… And That’s Expensive

The EU commission has a lot of fun these days to find fair rules to abolish roaming fees from 2017. I’ve written down my thoughts here and here but actually, even if roaming fees go away, we are only halfway there. And that’s because there’s another thing that needs fixing: Rates for mobile calls between EU countries.

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EU Roaming Fees Phase Out News – September 2016 – Part 2

In part 1 I’ve given an overview of the the draft EU legislation on removing roaming charges in 2017. The draft has been quite heavily criticized in a number of online publications. Unfortunately, those articles gave no particular reasons for their attitude other that the proposal does not go far enough as there should be no roaming charges at all anymore no matter who long people are abroad. Yes, it’s mass media so why over complicate things? Anyway, this is not mass media so I thought I’d share with you my personal thoughts.

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EU Roaming Fees Phase Out News – September 2016 – Part 1

A couple of days ago the EU has published a first draft of how to go forward with removing roaming charges in the EU starting in mid-2017. A number of press reports quickly followed which were mostly negative and which all failed to analyze the issues the proposed compromise wants to address and resolve in an acceptable way for both consumers and network operators. So I thought I’ll fill that gap over here. In this post, I’ve put together an overview of what the draft regulation proposes in some detail. In a follow up post I’ll give you my opinion what the reasons are the different limitations are proposed, which ones I find acceptable, which ones I don’t find acceptable from a consumer point of view and what I think is missing. So here we go, this is how I interpret the draft: Continue reading EU Roaming Fees Phase Out News – September 2016 – Part 1

Cellular-IoT – Part 7 – To IP or Not to IP – That is the Question!

This is part 7 of my series on Cellular-Internet of Things (CIoT) and NB-IoT. So far I always thought things above layer 2 were simple. There’s IP and that’s it then. But recently I came across an interesting paper by Rhode & Schwarz that suggests that this might not necessarily be the case.

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Cellular IoT – Part 6 – High Latency Communication

One of the main requirements of many IoT scenarios is extremely low power consumption of a device in exchange for only sending and receiving very little data and very long intervals in which no data is exchanged at all. If a device does not need to react instantly to incoming requests it doesn’t make sense to keep the radio module powered up all the time. If, for example it is enough to check once every half hour for incoming IP packets, the radio module can be completely switched off for most of this time which saves a lot energy. The downside is, of course, that in the worst case it takes 30 minutes for a device to respond to an incoming IP packet. To cater for such scenarios the 3GPP specifications were extended by a number of features for “High Latency Communication”. Let’s have a quick look at them.

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Ubuntu on Skylake

A few days ago I had the opportunity to run an installation of Ubuntu 16.04 on a Dell E5570 with a 6th Generation i7 Intel Skylake processor and chipset for a couple of hours. This is pretty much the latest hardware that is available at the moment so I was curious how the current Ubuntu version would fare.

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The IoT Elevator Pitch

At the end of the 1990s I was working on embedded devices that monitored the wear of wind turbine gears and which could be accessed remotely via a dial-up circuit switched modem connection. This eventually evolved into using the dial-up modem of the device to let it connect to the Internet so it could be accessed more cheaply when deployed on the other side of the world. That was 20 years ago and a prime use case of what is called the “Internet of Things” (IoT) today. But IoT seems to be a rather overused term today as it describes so many other applications, devices and business processes from unidirectional Bluetooth Low Energy beacons to making whole cities and factories become a part of the Internet. So I was looking for a simple statement to better grasp the term IoT and its overarching use.

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A Bluetooth Low Energy Layer 2 Wireshark Trace

In a previous post on Bluetooth Low Energy, I’ve shown how to do a Wireshark trace on the HCI interface without additional hardware and attached a sample trace. The downside of this approach is that the trace is made on the HCI interface between the PC and the Bluetooth hardware so layer 2 frames are unfortunately not included. It seems to be quite hard to get hold of Bluetooth layer 2 traces, but finally, I’ve come across from which one can gain interesting insights.

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