Posts by JetSetJim

Re: Shipping

> Iridium is owned by US gov, as military backup.

Erm - Iridium is a publicly traded company, currently worth about a fifth of INMARSAT. US Gov institutions don't seem to appear on the investor holdings pages, either...

The US DoD does account for about a quarter of Iridium's revenue, though (or it did in 2012 according to the wiki-gods)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_Communications

The BBC did a show, certainly. It took 30 cycle club members to run a kettle, and the 80-recruited members ran out of puff when the oven, vacuum cleaner and telly (plasma, IIRC)/wii were all turned on.

An interesting concept for the program - but currently unavailable on iPlayer :(

Re: The law is there for a reason, it’s to stop companies inundating people with unwanted messages

It would be nice, but the issue is that the companies are set up as limited companies, which protects the shareholders against such things as fines against the company. Break that and limited companies lose a lot of value (and become non-limited). Something else needs to be done

Re: What's the advantage to the consumer?

》 So, what is it, exactly, that we are supposed to gain from the expenditure of the other £10,730M? Surely it wouldn't be remote control of our energy supplies

Mustn't forget all the billable consultants and lobbyist hours

Re: There's only two reasons Apple is doing this

> The question is whether this reduced performance is a hardware or software flaw.

My guess is that it is neither - instead it is a "patent licensing flaw". QC have a huge bank of patents in this area and Intel would need to licence a large chunk of them to produce an equally performing product.

Re: Slightly off topic but...

> They would tell you that they would be paying x per unit, which was quite often less than your manufacturing cost.

I've even heard of folks entering into signed agreements with Tescos then being rung up at a later point and being told that the price per unit is being reduced. The Tescos buyers are no doubt under much pressure to reduce costs, so they've taken up this strategy with the hope that sufficient numbers of suppliers won't question the legality of this approach.

Re: idiots with more money than sense...

> Re: batteries. Our state has mandated that all new construction (since about 1990) have hardwired smoke detectors. No more batteries.

Err - don't they have battery backups inside them for when the fire takes out your power supply before they get a chance to deafen you?

Re: License Fee

Unfortunately that probably breaks their contractual obligations with geolocked copyright licenses. They need to start amending their standard licensing terms to be able to transmit their licensed content to anyone with a demonstrably valid(*) TV license.

(*) for some metric of "demonstrably valid" which will no doubt change over time. The first caveat will no doubt be "you can purchase a TV license if you are a permanent UK resident", or some such

Re: Crazy

> Search how cellular channel reuse works.

Then read up on how LTE works and discover it has nothing to do with cellular channel reuse as all frequencies in a band are available to use by all cells in an LTE network.

I've not read the test spec yet, but have been to various industry gigs describing the aims. In a nutshell, the aim of LTE-U is a way of fairly sharing frequencies with wifi. Under vanilla wifi, if the frequency is busy, wifi will back off. Under vanilla LTE, it will greedily grab the channels - thus stick them both in the same band and LTE throttles wifi. LTE-U offers a way for them to share & co-exist and the debate up til now has been a mechanism for that fairness. Seems like these tests define what the results of that mechanism should be.

@bazza

> How about proving that the car doesn't stop when it shouldn't?!

Give them a complete list of these scenarios and the test conditions then. I suspect that's why that wasn't in their list, as I'm sure it would be all too easy to miss a few dozen and then Thatcham would have egg on face. They should at least mention it, though, and I bet their fine print in whatever report they produced would do so.

Street-stats

Interesting site - I'd been wondering when someone would come up with something like that. Interestingly their testing methodology is run with an HTTP Post file transfer, which would run over TCP, which has a warm up time, so may well under represent what you might possibly be able to get with a UDP connection (admittedly with the possibility of errors).

It would be nice if house move websites allowed for an actual test result to be included in the sales brochure, rather than linking to the BT checker which abuses the "up to" terminology

>The real problem here is why would it be so difficult to block on device number (IMEI), especially unknown or unregistered device numbers, in an emergency like that, from a telco's point of view? Surely they are doing that all day long from stolen phones or faked IMEI, no?

Checking IMEI slows things down as it's an in-sequence check performed between UE and an EIR. In the case of checking it's stolen or not, that needs to go to the separate register of stolen devices, and even so - why would you be wanting to block a registered stolen phone from dialling the emergency services?

Networks have an obligation to connect all emergency calls, even from phones registered to another network.

The problem here is that a relatively small number of devices can untraceably be used to jam the emergency call centres - although you would need to distribute these phones in quite wide geographic areas to ensure either the cellular network is jammed with the attempts (limited call capacity per cell) and that you hit the target number of emergency call centres.

Re: Are your WiFi devices built using old valve tech? (if they are, send he circuit diagram, KTHX!)

Just not bothered to try and accurately add it up. 2 wifi ap's, 1 femto cell, 2 dependent switches, 3 dect phones, 1 nas. All on low numbers of watts over the night, so I just rolled that up and rounded gratuitously and probably didn't state units well. Even if I used 1kWh in the entire night for all that, that's 15p

Re: Building regs need to be changed as well!

> provide space in the home for 19" cabinet

Is this sarcasm? Not sure of the need for this in a small terraced house, and it would probably be accounted for in larger mansions - I'd instead encourage architecture university courses to update their design rules to adequately provision houses for their expected occupancy and use.

For example, from the ingress point of the broadband provision (fibre or copper), send the data-portion to a corner of the loft where a 4/8/16 port switch can be located, then Cat-6/7 to any relevant room (e.g. to where any TV is assumed to go, but you could well further future proof by running it to every plug socket). This will also require power to the loft, which is not that usual for new builds unless the purchaser requests it as an extra - equally not that difficult to retrofit as you can spur a low ampage socket off the lighting circuit.

It would also be nice if a wifi-plan could be produced at design time to minimise the APs you might need to get decent coverage in your house.

Internal BT-specified wiring is a bit redundant now, as you can either get an IP phone, or just DECT from the main socket.