Interesting links, week 44, 2023

Interesting telco/tech news for this week:

• Scaling Private Wireless Networks: A very good blog entry this week. Private networks might be failing due to the lack of thinking in verticals, beyond the simple RAN+core connectivity solution. Blog post has also a section of pro/cons on a per vertical basis. However, the “this can be done with Wi-Fi” might highlight the lack of killer use case for private networks.
• Barometro Telco Nae Q3-2023: [ES] a report on telco in Spain. With the growth of the “defiants” on this market, it is quite interesting to see how they old 3 operators are holding on their market share. Special mention to “Spain is no country for FWA.”, probably not a lot are. Couple of interesting numbers: package (TV/mobile/fixed) median tariff is 77 euros/month, revenue median for FTTH is 21,29 euros/month; Mobile traffic is 11.53GB/month, and mobile revenue is 7,66 euros/month.
• Pots and Pans on Google Moonshot: Good entry on Taara, the laser technology initially planned for Google Loon back-haul replacements for the initial WiFi the team used for early trials. I remember a lot of skepticism from the tier1 teams in charge of the transport network, which deemed the technology to be bad in dusty atmospheric conditions. Looks like they might have been quite wrong, and this is a great, cost effective alternative to space-based solutions like Starlink to bring transport connectivity. In the linked Google X blog post, this great comment: “When 99% is actually 100X better”, accompanying a map of the 10km visibility conditions.
• CNMC Android/iOS usage in spain: [ES] a nice analysis of the usage of both operating in Spain. We can clearly see that new generation is pushing the iOS market share here.

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

• Netflix using netconsole-setup: Technical blog post on how Netflix tracks panic on their node by using the netconsole-setup, a “last gasp” UDP packet system inside the linux kernel. Pretty neat.
• node-poweredup: a very nice NodeJS library to control… Lego technic boxes using Bluetooth GATT protocol. In 10 minutes I was helping my kid to control his electrical lego car with a lego remote control sold separately by bridging both with some simple lines of code. Doing it with the Lego apps would have require to learn their block language. I still wonder why we inflict those tools to our kids?
• My 2023 all-flash ZFS NAS: I personally use FreeNAS/Truenas for the last 10y without a single data loss with 2 NAS in remote sync, but I always find NAS custom construction very interesting. This one is particularly interesting in terms of server OS hardening, and use of Wake-On-Lan model (i.e. power it on when needed), renote decryption of data, etc.
• gokrazy’s DOCKER CONTAINERS: Gokrazy (tools to build golang appliance) can actually run containers with podman! This could be very nice to run some base image as appliance (like my VoIP server) and boot it as fast as possible.
• Autoeq: a fantastic project of providing equalizer model for apps to consume for each headset in the database.
• Apple cables CT scans: as formulated in the title: “Apple’s $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable could be worth it, as seen in X-ray CT scans”. Let’s hope that we start to acknowledge better engineered builds as a more sustainable way to consume technology.

Found a couple of nice toots on Mastodon:

• AWS BGP usage decomposition between BYOD and their own IP: 77.4% AWS, 22.6% BYOD. Quite interesting.