Posts by AndyFl 121 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2013
After all the stories about NSA spying on everyone in sight it is interesting to see the boot on the other foot. At least there are no silly statements about issuing arrest warrants to members of the Chinese military this time.
Considering the jobs and roles of some of the employees I do wonder why on earth this sensitive personal data was being held on Internet accessible machines.
Considering that FIFA are being investigated for Brazil corruption (amongst other things) where they were joined at the hip with WIPO it is a pretty good guess that WIPO are a target too.
So what will the UN do? Easy, start a quick investigation of WIPO to demonstrate they are active in anti-corruption and dig up the dirt before the Swiss and USA authorities publish embarrassing information. Having read previous stories it is obvious that there has been significant misbehaviour over several years from the top so public embarrassment is certain if they are not quick to do something.
It is a pity that they are not going to investigate WIPO UDRP Panel decisions at the same time which always always seem to support the complainant who is paying their fees.
Ho hum
andy
Apart from the issues about the antenna match causing time varying reflections most communications networks already use a form of TDMA. In the case of TDD LTE it is the same frequency.
Same frequency with duplex TX/RX will certainly have huge multipath problems from nearby objects too so it is a nonstarter.
Interesting bit of engineering but limited in use. I'd love to see the intermodulation performance figure, bet it isn't too good.
Andy
I thiught this sort of thing was covered under the EU consumer protection regulations. Doesn't matter if it is over a year old if there is a design flaw as this certainly appears to be.
Take the thing back to the seller and ask for your money back, if they refuse then talk to the local trading standards office. Watch Apple backpedal at the speed of light.
Andy
With high order modulation schemes you need about 3dB Carrier/Interference(C/I) ratio for every bit of throughput per hertz of spectrum. This comes out of information theory - It is a physical limit.
LTE operates within about 1dB of this physical limit plus around a 20% overhead for channel signalling. You can use signalling redundancy to tradeoff throughput for C/I. The eye-watering throughput claims of operators simply do not apply once you have multiple users on more than one LTE site in operation because they interfere with each other. In practice on a good day you might see around 20mbit downlink performance per cell sector on a 10MHz LTE channel and that is using MIMO. This figure will slowly increase in the future with higher order MIMO and also become more reliable with beam forming techniques.
You cannot reduce the noise in the channel by fancy coding schemes only by raising your transmit power and QAM based systems use extremely linear transmitters to maintain orthogonality. If the new proposed system dispenses with the linearity requirement you can improve transmitter power efficiency and raise the power with existing devices thereby giving you an improved C/I and more throughput. This is providing the telecommunications regulatory authority lets you increase the power. Cellphone transmit powers are limited to stop you absorbing too much signal with your head.
In any case most of the time a connection is 'interference limited' in that other transmissions impact the theoretical link C/I and reduce the throughput. If you have a short range connection then you may benefit with the new system but I suspect the improvements will be moderate rather than dramatic.
Andy
System 4 was before band 3 and was not a PTT system but full duplex.
The band 3 system was based on mpt1327 and internal calls did not need an operator.
No doubt I'll be downvoted again but at least I've had both types of equipment in my hands and spent several years designing mpt1327 radios and infrastructure.
In any case the systems were aimed at different markets. System 4 was PSTN but National-Band3 was for trucking companies, fleet vehicles etc who didn't need to make PSTN calls.
System 4 was surprisingly usable.
From the article:
"With increasing backhaul pressures on mobile phone networks that will want to stream large numbers of 4K video streams to subscribers, the bandwidth for each level of infrastructure matters."
I don't think ANY cellular network operator wants you to stream 4k video streams to clients at the moment and probably not for many years. One 4k stream will easily take 15Mbit, get a couple of subscribers on a site and watch everyone else grind to a halt. In any case I think the 7GB or so per hour traffic would eat through a data plan very quickly. I also suspect would break the terms and conditions of the '3' unlimited plan - assuming you can get that download speed on their network anyway.
The future for mobile video is in rate-adapting CODECs which adjust the stream throughput to the screen size and available backhaul capacity.
Andy
Batten down the hatches, encrypt the sh1t out of everything and only buy your IT kit anonymously from high street retailers now. Also do not use Outlook or IE for anything.
I guess the same goes for all comment contributors too and maybe everyone reading the comments being traced via their IP address.
It is time for TheRegister to go https, marginal additional security but will make the GCHQ computers work harder, come on guys it isn't that difficult to setup https.
Finally lets have PGP public keys for all addresses linked from TheRegister contact page too.
andy
The red dot in Seeb is about 1km from where I live, will have to eyeball the place. This area is a good one to land fibre and it is near to the expensive area called The Wave where expats are actually allowed to own property. I may have been standing next to a GCHQ spy in Costa Coffee there :p
Good on TheRegister in posting this story, I'm sure that the (so called) intellegence community know all about the place so publishing the story doesn't change anything security related but at least now the public have the possibiity of asking questions about cost and whether the place should exist.
Andy
" Why don't they just upgrade AirWave to 4G?"
Lots of reasoms, first is LTE doesn't support multicast which you need for efficient group calls. This will only be fixed in rel12 which will not be out for a couple of years. There is also the issue of handsets and a properly tested voice system, they don't even have VoLTE handsets in the market yet.
Then there is terminal security - a bog standard Android install is not good enough for security agencies.
Ask the question in 3 years and you might get a better answer.
Andy
This announcement must have pissed off Larry Ellison of Oracle big time.
A solid no-cost alternative to the Oracle database with the approval of Google, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is not something he would like to read about during breakfast.
Doesn't matter how many bugs there are in WebScaleSQL at the moment as it will only get better with time.
This could end up hurting Cisco. Some of the names in the story do large government projects in the Middle East. If they cannot sell Cisco as part of an integrated project they will either use their own or other suppliers equipment.
As an example, I'm sure Juniper will still supply to Alcatel and Avaya.
In any case the shared support (or whatever it is called now) is a real scam and gets tagged on the end of every quote. It looks like a Cisco tax as the customer is forced to sign up for it regardless of if they want any support.
Might end up weakening the Cisco stranglehold in many places.
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