Interesting links, week 45, 2023

Interesting telco/tech news for this week:

• The Company that broke Canada: posted at $WORK by a younger colleague, an interesting story telling of Nortel.
• Qualcomm-Iridium Deal collapses: “the partnership fell through because smartphone vendors “indicated a preference towards standards-based solutions.” according the article, which seems to point to the efforts to standardize NTN in future 3GPP releases. This is probably also inline with some vendors interest (i.e. satellite payload vendor).

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

• Caricatures of Security People: a gallery of archetypes in Infosec. A good one, very valid those days: “Despite this (“legacy-free”) they still managed to create risk concentration by putting all their identity eggs in the one basket of a regularly troubled SaaS IdP.”.
• BGP mega sheet: a decorative cheat sheet on the basics of BGP protocol.
• iOS17 Private Cellular and Wifi Shortcuts: a good summary of new tooling around Wifi on iOS (i.e. shortcuts that display some wifi info). An interesting trend here is the use of shortcuts to “process” debug data from the phone, i.e. Shortcuts app is enabling access to device level logs, which the developer will post process to extract relevant info. The old Airport apps is still the only one relevant to do network scanning on iOS, as far as I know. I really like that they managed to find a shortcut trick for the cellular field tests app.
• Optus Nationwide Outage (08/11/2023): good coverage of the nationwide outage that affected Optus. It is kind of sad state of things when you realized that VoWiFi was one of the last service to be back online. Perhaps VoWiFi should be an entry point of emergency cores - i.e. in case of outage, bring online a simplified core what only respond on the public ePDG and provide tunneling back to the P-CSCF sip endpoint and RTP proxies.

Listened a couple of nice podcasts this week:

• Une historia de Vodafone: in [ES] some numbers and history behind Vodafone Spain, that has just been bought by a UK fund. Nearly 16 years of business in Spain, building a competitor facing the incumbent Telefonica/Movistar, buying a cable business to enter the converged connectivity space, and facing a sustained low cost competition, while maintaining a very premium pricing. It is interesting to note that their RAN network has been always really excellent - I remember getting 1.3Gbps with them consistency under NSA 3.5Ghz in cities starting in 2020, and good coverage in 800Mhz in rural area outside “pueblos”. Telefonica is only now reaching those speeds in low density NSA 3.5Ghz deployments. Perhaps the fact Vodafone global RAN group was also located in Spain is explaining such a performance.