Software-defined GSM components August 23, 2009

Telecom junkies out there, imagine a BTS functioning entirely from a software unit, using software-defined radios as the basis for the reference air interface over a Universal Software Radio Peripheral USB board or similar technology. A system that in essence transmits via the regular IP-stack as is currently widely used, terminating calls on the same unit via SIP or other Voice over IP protocol. In other words, a system that in effect, bypasses the traditional GSM mobile switching centre infrastructure from the BTS level while still providing for integration.

I think it could be a viable solution for telephony in low-traffic or special deployment scenarios such as rural areas or military operations.

I’m currently evaluating one such software-defined BTS solution that seems to have quite the promise.

I envision a ‘micro-communications’ architecture allowing users to use telecommunication resources on an ‘on-demand’ basis thereby reducing CAPEX and OPEX for Telcos as they reach out to low-traffic areas which in turn should foster lower price-points for say, less privileged communities as is the case in most rural establishments.

Revenue generation models are vast as much as they are unique such as carrier component outsourcing to municipality-run tech hubs (imagine the technology transfer opportunities and new skill-set development possible), revenue-share off contextual and location-aware value-add services, etc. This could truly revolutionize telecommunications at last-mile level among other frontiers.

If you’ve got ideas, comments and/or suggestions, do drop me an email at mukembo@gmail.com and we can share thoughts on the subject. I hope to someday write a paper summarizing my findings.

Update 1

To simply matters a little, I’ll attempt a non-technical explanation.

I assume we have all at some point, seen those red and white tower-like structures with funny looking equipment at the top of them around town or distributed in a given area. Those pieces of equipment are referred to base transceiver stations (BTS) . They facilitate wireless communications using the GSM specification as defined by 3GPP, the governing body. These BTS units fall under the Network Switching Subsystem Infrastructure and all interface with the Network Management Centre.

Through the use of specialized software and a few pieces of supporting hardware, it is theoretically possible (as per 3GPP specifications of GSM technology) to use a purely software-based system to route call traffic in GSM networks, possibly even for CDMA specifications. The idea being, defining a base station i.e BTS site, using software alone is much cheaper than actually constructing and maintaining a full-scale base station.

The Network Operation Center, being versatile, can be modified to treat particular network components, the software-defined BTS for examples, as independent units insofar as resource management and allocation is concerned.

Its from that point that commercial viability comes into play. For example, an operator covering metropolitan Nottingham in England, can decide to make the low-traffic out-skirts of the metropolis route GSM traffic via software-defined BTS sites, that way reducing the costs of deployment and maintenance of these pre-requisite BTS units for that section. That cost saving can then, in an ideal world, be re-invested in the development and deployment of Value-added services such as geo-tagging, which should in turn generate churn for the network in those sectors justifying their operation from a cost-benefit perspective. The networks earn more money in that way while, ideally, providing a bouquet of services to end-users that generate billable voice/video/data traffic. I call that synergy of service where operators get maximum efficiency and end-users, maximum utility.

That is in summary, the concept behind what I am talking about here.

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Dawn of a new era? July 23, 2009

This afternoon I attended the ‘Ready for Service’ launch of Seacom. Seacom is the first of the 3 cables ( Seacom, TEAMS and EASSy) expected to connect East Africa to the rest of the world. Despite pirate attacks, delayed financial closure and other regulatory hiccups, the project went ahead from inception late 2006 to commercial launch today, July 23 2009, with full construction and testing completed within a measly 18 months.

A fully private sector project, 76.25% African owned by:

• Industrial Promotion Services (26.56%), an arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development
• Venfin Limited (25%)
• Convergence Partners (12.5%)
• Shanduka Group (12.5%)

with the remaining 23.44% owned by Herakles Telecom LLC from the USA, Seacom is truly a breath of fresh-air when it comes to African Infrastructural projects when one considers the short and precise execution of the project.

Initially, the undersea cable is to provide 1.2TB/s with forecast growth of well over 12.5% p.a and totals over 17000km from Johannesburg, South Africa to London, Saudi Arabia and Mumbai.

According to head of finance Arthur Musinguzi, Seacom has a price-point target  of ‘$50 to $150′ for each Megabit, wholesale, capacity which bulk-buyers like Uganda’s 5 GSM operators and 1 CDMA 2000 player, alongside the numerous Internet Service Providers, can then retail to end-users or add to their service-delivery capacity. Given current rates that stand in the $1000-$5000 range for each Megabit per second (Mbps) of capacity via VSAT(in Kampala), this is considered a relief, although consumers may have to wait until September this year to begin to experience price-cuts.

When testing the technology, I was making round-trips to CNN, YouTube, BBC etc., in milliseconds in comparison to the 5-10 seconds I was accustomed to from the average service provider.

I am truly excited to have been part of the launch but also to have experienced first hand, a possible use-case when we were connected via Cisco’s IP services backbone to Tanzania to watch live, a set of presentations by Seacom, the ITU chief, Brian Herlihy (Seacom CEO) and a speech by H.E. Jakaya Kikwete in clarity previously unimagined.

With this capacity, new industries can now spring up in broadcasting, telecommunications, outsourcing, governance, cultural-social development etc., provided sufficient and relentless efforts by regional governments in creating human equity through capacity development, infrastructural enhancement (terrestrial links, last-mile solutions, computing infrastructure), private-sector incentives and creating effective think-tanks.

For now I can only wait and watch as we East Africans attempt to harness this new capacity but also myself endeavour to remain at the forefront of technological, ideological and economic reform.

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QoS, Throughput and SLAs. How about the consumer? December 23, 2008

I’ve participated in the Internet Service Provider market for a while now, mostly as an application developer in the value-added services space. The issues that keep arising in our customer experiences and product design are Quality of Service, Throughput and Service Level Agreements. We seem to look for economic combinations of the three to justify pricing or business models and forget the customer.

I’ve used 3G services for a while now, from around 2005 when I was enrolled in a test group for Uganda Telecom’s HSDPA network (commercialized late 2007),  to the connection I’m using to write this article. I’m using Safaricom’s HSDPA/UMTS service with most components of the backend system sourced through or provided by, Huawei Technologies. My biggest frustration is that I have not got anywhere close to the 7Mbps my SLA with Safaricom stipulates. The inconsistencies in network availability as I move my laptop from the living room, to the balcony or even to my bedroom, are unacceptable for infrastructure costing well over $30 million and a service coming from “East Africa’s Most Respected Company”. Today this brought to mind the question of balancing quality and availability of service  and the terms of the SLA providers engage consumers in.

In the case where a consumer is bound by a recurrent billing engagement, as I am in this situation, should I then not demand to receive nothing less in terms of actual throughput to my consumer terminal than is stipulated in my post paid customer agreement with the service provider? The purpose of regulatory frameworks, as in the Kenyan perspective, of Communication Commission of Kenya, is to ensure that the mutual interests of the consumers and producers of a service, are observed for as long as neither party infringes on the liberties of the other or in any way, attempts to act otherwise, as stipulated by law. I feel, and strongly so, that the regulatory approach in African markets protects the service provider more than it does the consumer. We should have an entity within our regulatory body, CCK in this case, that deals exclusively with monitoring correlation between terms of the SLA and actual throughput to the point of consumption, checking specifically for unjustifiable inconsistencies. I even propose imposition of temporary draconian law to enforce this, given the benefits it delivers to the overall economy.

If I as a consumer, individual or corporate, can rely on the SLA as being a true reflection of the actual Quality of Service I experience at the end of the day then, I am in a position to actively engage in consuming Over The Top services like Internet Telephony or mobile video, with little hesitation. This provides new growth markets for the service providers, increasing their ARPU and consequently, their EBITDA and Operating Profit, while creating new sectors of the economy that facilitate growth within the market served. For the sake of overall economic prosperity, shouldn’t we as consumers then be more aggressive in demanding that the terms of our SLAs indeed reflect the caliber of service delivered to us, and demand accountability to that effect? And on the part of service providers, shouldn’t we be more vigilant, if not for the sake of increasing market share, in standing true to our word by seeking practical integration of the terms of the SLAs, QoS and throughput to the consumer terminal?

I think its pathetic that we’ve allowed this vice of irresponsibility, especially on the part of service providers, to persist this long.

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On viability of tripple play networks December 19, 2008

This afternoon while reading up on UPenn’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences faculty, I landed on Saswati Sakar, an associate professor in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department. Her work on Joint allocation of resources in multihop wireless networks reminded me of the long argument I’ve possessed in my mind regarding the viability of technology augmentation.

One argues that to compete in the current investment-lacking environment, staying lean is the way forward. My concern here is that the lack of standardization across multiple technology standards creates technical overhead that defeats this “scaling down” initiative. I’m a strong believer in the 1963 OSI model and the IEEE model that followed it in the ’80s. This basic network architecture specification illustrates one important principle; without a base reference model insofar as voice-video-data integration from the session to application layers, it will remain elusive this ideal that one can have a truly “triple play” environment. Issues of bandwidth utilization, Quality of Service and hardware specifications immediately come to mind.

While working with one2net in Uganda, I noticed the use of and on occasion worked with the Cisco, iDirect satellite, Motorola Cannopy and eXreme Networks infrastructure in most of our NOC and provisioning operations. Each of these vendors specifies access layers that without innovative hacking, make tasks like unified deployment recipes, impossible. This is the argument a CTO would use to get his organization to approve a multi-million  budget for acquiring more proprietry “integrated” platforms.

Though currently vague this urgument, I believe tripple play networks are the least to say, appropriate for trial deployments of up to 15 million users. More effort is required in fields such as multipoint input multipoint output cellular network plans, GSM/CDMA switching over IP through SIP/AIX – PSTN/TDMA/CDMA integration and related layer 1 (physical) to 4 (transport) issues (reference to the OSI model). I will expand the article as I investigate further.

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Reflections on the Economic Situation a.k.a ‘Crisis’ November 2, 2008

And so it turns out that Capitalism is on the verge of collapse. Is it really?!

Resilience is a feature of human nature. The need to readopt according to changes in our situation has enabled us to find survival each and every time our existence has thus far been challenged or worse still, threatened. It is for this reason that in almost all of man’s creations, survival is incorporated.

Given that insight, I believe the current situation is merely a trough in the maturity curve of the current economic growth phase. I can’t however, deny or shy away from the fact that inevitably, some radical reforms are going to be instituted to avert a possibility of the $15 trillion plus in damage I forecast for FY-08/09 across the world’s major economies.

Out of a need to sustain its superiority, the US has thus far committed $1 trillion, in less than 1 year, to recover confidence and performance in its financial systems.  How about the $80+ Billion Gordon Brown’s UK set aside, or the recent moves to stabilize Russia’s stock market following its 75% shed in value for the period until early October, 2008? The times are challenging these.

The question is asked, will we survive?! My simple response, if history is anything to go by, and it is, then humanity will summon its inner most strengths and rise up above this rather calamitous set of events, to even further strengthen its socio-economic stance.

Watch the Tech stocks!

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Arthur [at] opensourcerails.com August 19, 2008

Opensourcerails.com seeks to showcase the latest and finest in Ruby on Rails projects that have been made available under open source licencing. The idea is to provide an adoption platform for the technologies and to bridge the gap between learners and professional rails developers.

New features such as a blog and forum among other things,are slated for introduction in the coming weeks.

I will keep you updated on the comings and goings of open source rails and my work at opensourcerails.com

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Even sweeter Ruby on Rails deployment August 15, 2008

Last night as I was preparing to hookup yet another server with the Rails production environment, I stumbled upon FiveRuns. These guys have all that an enterprise application developer would require: they’ve got an off-the-self solution for setting up your Ruby environment called FiveRuns Install, a Tuneup tool and an enterprise ready server management and monitoring tool all of which in combination, see to it that your rails deployments run as smoothly as butter on bread.

The installation is so simple that for Fiveruns Install ( which I deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.6), all I had to do was run mv  rminstall-1.1-0-linux-installer.bin rminstall-1.1-0-linux-installer.bin then click on the renamed file, now a standard RPM file, and I was in business with the infamous one-click installer type of interface. Instructions after that are so simple even a novice could interpret them.

Within 5 minutes or so, I had a full production environment running that was independent of my other installations, particularly Ruby!

If this doesn’t meet your need either email me and let me know or find a lone cat and strangle it!

Fiveruns Install comes with:

• Ruby 1.8.6
• RubyGems 1.0.1
• Rails 2.0.2
• ImageMagick 2.4.6
• Subversion 1.4.6
• MySQL 5.0.45
• Apache 2.2.8

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Deploying Ruby on Rails on FreeBSD August 11, 2008

Ruby on Rails is a premier Web Application Framework full of Web 2.0 goodness. Only problem is, I’ve used it fine in development but this time around, I wanted to deploy a high traffic application through a Jail install (don’t ask me what I was thinking!). In this article I explore some of the errors I met along the way and how I resolved them.

First thing I noted, the hard way, was a Jail really is a bare bone installation hence, YOU SETUP EVERYTHING YOURSELF!

So, how did I start?!

1. Install Ruby: One of the reasons I’ve fallen for FreeBSD is its well planned ports. All I have to do to get the default release available is simply type:
   1. cd /usr/ports/lang/ruby18
   2. make config (optional stage if you want to customize your environment)
   3. make install clean

All the dependant libraries are downloaded and installed as part of this directive. Takes anywhere from 5 mins to 5 hours (my connection kept being interrupted by network upgrades at my ISP hence the 5+ hours) depending on processor speed and internet connectivity

When done, proceed to step 2

1. Install Ruby gems, Ruby’s native package manager: The guys at FreeBSD also thought it wise to include an installer for the otherwise evasive Rubygems installation. Simply punch in
   1. cd /usr/ports/devel/ruby-gems
   2. make install clean
2. Then install mongrel/Thin by keying in
   1. gem install mongrel (note: the –y (include dependencies flag) is now default for Ruby gems so don’t worry about it)
   2. If you prefer Thin (like I do) for running your test apps, simply key in: cd /usr/ports/www/rubygem-thin then the traditional make install
3. Ladies and gentlemen, the tough part arrives….next we install MySQL Server. I prefer version 5.1 which you can install as follows:
   1. cd /usr/ports/databases/mysql51-server
   2. make install

This should take a longer period than Ruby to compile but otherwise, is about 25 MB of a download. This tends to break a lot so be watchful of broken or incompatible referenced libraries like libexec!

Other database options include: SQLite3 and PostgreSQL or if you’re a fan of “Enterprise platforms”, Oracle 10g

1. Install Apache: By far the seemingly easiest step. Whatever you do, avoid including support for LDAP lest you get an annoying load of errors at compile time. There’s a patch available for that (I just don’t feel like giving it to you!). Down to business
   1. Again, I prefer apache22 so we’ll get that one sorted: cd /usr/ports/www/apache22/
   2. Run make config to select libraries you may need. REMEMBER AVOID ADDING LDAP SUPPORT AT THIS STAGE!
      
   3. make install clean

This step takes ages since this is a jail install with loads of uninstalled dependencies!

1. Install Passenger. Phusion Passenger used to be called mod_rails and is an apache module that enables you run rails applications through virtual servers. The installation is pretty straight forward so I won’t give any more detail other than the website.
2. Install Ruby Enterprise Edition. When you combine Ruby Enterprise Edition and Passenger, you can get 33% and more RAM optimization by your Ruby and/or Ruby on Rails apps! That allows you to run more applications on a single hardware slice! Again, the installation is pretty straight forward thanks to the folks at Phusion
3. Follow the instructions at the end of the installation including the demonstration on how to set up virtual hosts and you’re up! If you feel stuck, there’s a brilliantly designed FAQ to help you get through it.

If you get problems following my guidelines, let me know where I went wrong, but I can safely say, it should work out just fine!

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PHP-Ruby integration March 21, 2007

Parrot is a register-based virtual machine being developed using the C programming language and intended to run dynamic languages efficiently. It uses just-in-time compilation for speed to reduce the interpretation overhead. It is currently possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR (an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it.

Parrot was started by the Perl community, and is developed with help from the open source and free software communities. As a result, it is focused on license compatibility (Artistic License 2.0), platform compatibility across a broad array of systems, processor architectures compatibility across most modern processors, speed of execution, small size (around 700k depending on platform), and being flexible enough to handle the varying demands of Perl, and most, if not all, other modern dynamic languages. It is also focusing on improving introspection, debugger capabilities, and compile-time semantic modulation.

Existing client languages

Besides a subset of the planned Perl 6, an increasing number of languages can be compiled to Parrot assembly language including APL, BASIC, Befunge, Brainfuck, Cola, Forth, Jako, Lisp, m4, Miniperl, Parakeet, OpenComal, PHP, Plot, Pheme, Punie, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Span, Tcl (aka partcl), URM, YAL, and Zork Z-code. Most of these other language implementations are currently still incomplete and experimental.  What caught me was the Ruby support.

So, since this is already doing what I was developing, I decided to change my efforts to actively contributing to improving the VM and to the Ruby support in particular. In fact, I am working with the current Beta of Ruby 1.9 to find a way to integrate it into the platform.  Furthermore, I have recently adopted a second language in an initiative to adopt the J2EE platform for complex projects. Groovy is a simply great, Java like language (major difference: Its interpreted rather than compiled!). Its in my plans to work with the creators of Groovy later this year to come up with a port to the Parrot VM.

Now with the heavy weights going Open Source: Microsoft’s CLR, Sun’s Java and Adobe’s Flex/ AIR(I kinda predict a merger announcement for the two RIA minting tools by the end of Fall 2008) and many other heavy weights, Parrot’s mission becomes more relevant. My only concern is, will the Parrot guys create/ initiate a merger or interoperability engine with the guys over at the Mono Project.  As for now, the best I can do is participate in creating the future! What better way than by co-developing Ruby and Groovy integration into Parrot and Mono?!

To the future of enterprise computing, Rich Internet Applications, social empowerment and computing!

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Yale Swahili Project facing Axe?! November 21, 2006

The Yale University hosted project describes itself as the “Internet living swahili database” and aims at offering english-swahili linguistic interchange. It poses a wide variety of offerings for the internet savvy user such as:

• Online Dictionaries are available for you to search, browse, and download.
• The Edit Engine enables you to contribute to ongoing development of the dictionaries, and the Grouping Tool allows you to help arrange the way dictionary results appear to the public.
• Use our Photo Uploader to contribute appropriate pictures to illustrate dictionary entries.
• The Internet Living Swahili Learning Center includes lessons and much more. We also maintain a page linking to Swahili books, dictionaries, and audiotapes.
• The Swahili Discussion Forum hosts ongoing conversations about Swahili and East Africa.
• Yale Africa Guide InterActive provides selected Internet links to Africa-related sites.
• Frequently Asked Questions about the project, movies, online translations, and more.We suggest that first-time visitors read through our page of Frequently Asked Questions before posting questions to the Discussion Forum.

I discovered this site today while working on a branding project for a local marketing firm and I think it needs our attention as promoters of the advancement of matters concerning the liberation and enlightenment of the African being from our recent state of ignorance on matters concerning other cultures. If you consider yourself one of the old-age African patriots then, like me, you will visit this website and you will use: http://www.goodsearch.com/?charityid=838610 as your search engine. I stress the search engine because for every 10,000 visits (about 2 visits from each of us on a daily basis for 5 days a week in 1 month), the project gets an approximated $73,000! Imagine that! Further more, please click at least 3 of the Google Ads on the site per visit because the Kumasi Project will earn approximately $0.06 per click you make.

I would like to see this project produce the first English-Swahili search engine with Google-like integration. Something that the under educated Africans will easily relate with but one that we can all use with pride

To the future

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