Interesting links, week 46, 2023

Interesting telco/tech news for this week:

• Starlink backhaul in Kenya: an interesting experience, although the two Wifi chains mentioned in the thread are not giving great insights to the actual performance behind the terminal. Another review from Linkedin is mentioned. The lack of the Ethernet port is quite something indeed.
• Netherlands opens up 3.6 GHz band for local 5G networks: NL are authorizing 5G local permits in the 3.6Ghz, way before the 300Mhz will be put in auction to MNOs.
• Mobile & Wireless Roundup #67: A good introductory comment on analysts in the telco space, and why they should speak their mind, especially if a feature, while interesting and useful, do not bring any advantage at commercial level. Totally agree on the comment on how 5G NSA diverted the energies on 5G SA. On the other hand, having implemented myself a good chunk of the minimal subset of the 5G SA core in parallel of a 4G core, the innovation is quite limited especially on the RAN<->core communication. Barely good fixes, but no fundamental revamping of the paradigm.
• KPN capital markets day: good nuggets on KPN, i.e. 13.5Tbps of traffic peak this year, 4Mbps/sub. I was more jumping at the “160” locations with presence of some cache for Netflix/Youtube in their metro core. Network APIs for 2027 horizon.

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

• OrbStack: super nice replacement for Docker Desktop on Macs. Handles rosetta properly, and have very nice optimizations. Free for personal use model. They have nice CLI tricks like dropping a ssh configuration to run proxy commands, and virtiofs to mount your home directory. Offers a small k8s node optionally (like Rancher). I will use it in parallel of Colima which I often completely forget and runs continuously in background.
• Debian on Mellanox SN2700: an accounting of the performance of the switchdev driver from mellanox on their 100G switches.
• ice9-bluetooth-sniffer: a wideband sniffer for HackRF and USRP hardware for hunting bluetooth signals.