Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The T-Mobile Dance

Not much more to say - this is just an excellent marketing action ! I don't know how effective it was in the sense of how it spread across the internet or as word of mouth but since I - a guy here in Poland - am writing about it in my blog I would guess it made some proper fuss. I wonder how I would react if I was there in the middle of the crowd - I'd be really surprised at what the hell is going on.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

Sunday links

links to some services worth putting up

calliflower

web scheduled conference calls, documents sharing, local dial in numbers, flat rate pricing

Contails

synchronize mobile phone contacts, exchange contacts, import contacts
..poland startup

free ad based telephony

callingamerica.com

Calling America is a free telephony service. It is web based and you can call any landline or mobile number in the US free of charge. The user has to watch an advertisement on the web site before the call is connected. The web site uses a flash phone to deliver the media. For unregisterd users the calls are limited to two minutes whereas registered users can place unlimited number of 15 minute max telephone calls.

I like this idea, it is close to what I have done in Gadu-Gadu (Gadu naGÅ‚os). Users can place free ad sponsored calls to landline numbers in Poland. Calls are limited to 10 mintes in duration - the caller hears up to 10 seconds advertisement before the call is connected and every 2 minutes once the call is connected both the caller and calle hear up to 3 seconds advertisement interruption. Internet telephony is becoming (is) a commodity - business models based on per minute charges just don't work anymore! Fixed lines are nearly as cheap as VoIP now, for a fixed monthly fee you just dont worry about the costs and dont have to sit by the PC to call. Furthermore mobile calls are cheaper and cheaper, you always have the mobile nearby and is just much damn easier to place the call from your fave mobile. As far as I care the only way to go with your VoIP offering is to boundle it with something that generates dough and give the VoIP for free...

Monday, February 9, 2009

mobile industry of 4 billion users

I really enjoy reading this blog. This post gives a 360 overview of the mobile industry worldwide and shows you how huge of an industry mobile actually is.

'Lets start with comparisons. Newspapers? the total circulation of all daily newspapers worldwide is about 480 milllion. Cars? There are about 800 million cars on the planet. Cable and satellite TV subscriptions? About 850 million. Personal computers including desktops, laptops and netbooks, about 1 billion. Fixed landline telephone connections, about 1.2 billion. eMail users about 1.3 billion. Internet users about 1.4 billion. Television sets about 1.5 billion. And credit cards? About 1.7 billion people carry at least one credit card in their wallet.

But there are 4 billion mobile phone subscriptions now in January 2009. More than twice the number of credit card owners, 2.5 times the number of TV sets or internet uses, approx 3 times the number of email users of total landline phones and yes, four times the number of personal computers. This is a monster sized industry, totally towering over all others.'

I really recommend reading this post.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2009/02/bigger-than-tv-bigger-than-the-internet-understand-mobile-of-4-billion-users.html

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

some more on camel and wireshark

So what we did to trace Camel over Sigtran with wireshark. As I mentioned in my previous post, we have connected a dedicated linux ‘sniffer’ machine to a port on a switch with port mirroring enabled for the Sigtran port. If you plan to run the traces on a windows machine – install an X server, I have been recommended Xming Server. Then you enable SSH X11 forwarding in your putty session, login to the machine – type wireshark, choose the appropriate interface to capture and you are ready to go. For me the capture did not decode the packets at first – all I got were SCTP packets and the trace did not go beyond that. To get the capture to decode Camel I had to change some Protocol settings in the preferences menu window (Edit->Preferences). First M3UA Version was changed to RFC 3332, then Camel TCAP SSN was changed to 146. After applying the changes the capture properly decoded Camel packets.
Example of initialDPSMS packet:

No. Time Source Destination Protocol Info
324 2009-01-30 17:52:21.464283 2660 3406 Camel invoke initialDPSMS

Frame 324 (278 bytes on wire, 278 bytes captured)
Ethernet II, Src: HuaweiTe_db:c8:e8 (00:e0:fc:db:c8:e8), Dst: HuaweiTe_db:d2:7b (00:e0:fc:db:d2:7b)
Internet Protocol, Src: 10.10.100.17 (10.10.100.17), Dst: 10.10.100.16 (10.10.100.16)
Stream Control Transmission Protocol, Src Port: 4010 (4010), Dst Port: 4000 (4000)
MTP 2 User Adaptation Layer
Message Transfer Part Level 3
Signalling Connection Control Part
Transaction Capabilities Application Part
Camel
invoke
invokeId: present (0)
present: 0
opcode: local (0)
local: initialDPSMS (60)
InitialDPSMSArg
serviceKey: 15
destinationSubscriberNumber: 8105617588F7
callingPartyNumber: 918427090000F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48729000000
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
eventTypeSMS: sms-CollectedInfo (1)
iMSI: 62009195006930F0
TBCD digits: 260019590096030
locationInformationMSC
vlr-number: 918406010011F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000110
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdOrLAI: cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdFixedLength (0)
cellGlobalIdOrServiceAreaIdFixedLength: 62F0102AFEA3E0
sMSCAddress: 918406010013F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000310
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2
timeAndTimezone: 0290100371755140
tPShortMessageSpecificInfo: 11
tPProtocolIdentifier: 00
tPDataCodingScheme: 00
tPValidityPeriod: FF
smsReferenceNumber: 00C03B083264CBE8
mscAddress: 918406010011F0
1... .... = Extension: No Extension
.001 .... = Nature of number: International Number (0x01)
.... 0001 = Number plan: ISDN/Telephony Numbering (Rec ITU-T E.164) (0x01)
Address digits: 48601000110
Country Code: 48 Poland length 2