Interesting links, week 37, 2023

Interesting telco/tech news for this week:

• Building DReaMeRS: How and why we opened a datacenter in France: Interesting feedback post on why to choose Marseille and the culprits of the post-pandemic supply chain for DCs.
• Apple Renews Qualcomm Deal in Sign Its Own Modem Chip Isn’t Ready: Not entirely surprising, but usually Apple acquisitions (like Intel’s modem business) appear in some form or shape into a product in the next 2 years. Acquisition was in Q4 2019, so a product with some home-made baseband would have make sense this year. Bizarre.
• DNS is the new BGP: “It’s a service selection problem, and the steering of the user to the best service portal is best achieved by using the DNS as the way of linking users and services.” 100% yes! Most of my observed intermittent failures are typically resolved by killing the cache on my local machine (or switching doing airplane mode on mobile device) and hopping to get a working instance on the next DNS query, but this makes connectivity debugging even more complex.
• It’s (Not Necessarily) Fair to Mock Apple’s “Mother Nature” Video: some reactions to the “Mother nature” video from last Apple event. A dud sketch indeed, especially in a week with some many deaths due to an earthquake and extreme weather conditions. Perhaps going back to a live event, more simple, more adjustable and, perhaps, more risky will honor more the company’s efforts.

Found a couple of nice links this week on the Internet:

• Teslogic: a software dashboard for the supposed “entry-level” EVs that cannot affort a speedometer apparently. Curious if this is in fact some OBD2 interface behind the scene.
• IPGO: a game from APNIC for iOS (android also available) where you need to reactivate the Internet using the blog notes of a network operator.

Listened a couple of nice podcasts this week:

• telecom.com: in the intro, you will learn how the gluten-free beer of a famous brand in Barcelona is made. And also telco’s politics with the favorite Huawei topic.
• Interception: [French only sorry!] un épisode sur le triste état du deploiement de la fibre en France, ou les points de concentration sont des armoires dans l’espace public, soumis à des soucis divers de mauvaise sous-traitrance et même malveillance.
• Desert Islands Discs - Christophe Nolan: an interview with Christopher Nolan with creative questions.