UVAgeek » Technology

Mobile Telecommunications and Verizon Wireless Service Level Agreements

Dan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:37:38 +0000

This morning in the Northern Virginia area, Verizon Wireless seems to have had a hiccup in their data networks that support their mobile devices. This is the third such hiccup to effect the 4G customer base this year – something that marketing is heavily pushing and early adopters are salivating over due to the speed and technology advances that are provided.

Information regarding outage: http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/12/21/verizon-suffering-another-outage-many-3g-and-4g-customers-left-without-data-services/

It really would be nice to know when the system will come to steady state for LTE and CDMA access to be restored. While I realize that Verizon is doing its best to provide service to millions of customers, I would also hope that Verizon would be willing to provide something like “status.vzw.com” that has either a blog with entries of what network outages may be occurring on a large scale or something like Google or Amazon Web Services dashboard that shows outages related to services with additional information below.

Is this too much to ask for a multi-billion dollar industry so that individuals that rely on mobile telecommunications are able to more adequately recommend or put faith into their provider?

PanTech UML 290 LTE–First Thoughts

Dan — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 03:49:43 +0000

So I bit the bullet and bought the PanTech UML 290 from Verizon Wireless, flat out. Works like a champ… when it works. The above speed test was taken from my house. I noticed that after about ten minutes, the card would stop transmitting traffic. At first I thought, “alright, maybe there’s a hardware issue.”

Oddly enough though I would run an NSLookup and get a valid response. I would try to ping Google.com and it would ping. So I was left scratching my head wondering why I wasn’t able to transmit and receive anything other than just a DNS record or an ICMP. So what did I do? I called Verizon’s tech support.

So I disconnected and then reconnected and all was back to normal with super fast network connectivity that scared me (yes, scared me thinking to myself that just a few years ago these speeds in a wired environment were usually only in corporate data networks or academic environments). Then about ten to fifteen minutes later, boom, disconnect. Third times a charm I figured, and gave it another reconnect request, this time the session was flawless and had no issues, lasted 45 minutes long and then I disconnected manually and left for dinner with a few friends. When I got back, I opened a ticket with Verizon support – they called back pretty quickly and left a message since I wasn’t available. Rather than shy away from the issue I went ahead and gave them a call to further discuss.

After talking with a gent about what was going on, it was confirmed from my network traffic that there were “at cause” issues where the modem would attempt to talk to a specific node of the LTE cell and be disconnected from transmitting at that level and cease data traffic altogether. Because it’s the network side an official ticket was opened and network engineering team will investigate the network hardware and routing to correct the issue.

So first thoughts, LTE is blazing fast. LTE is expensive in that Verizon wireless is capping at 5 GB for $50, 10 GB for $80. I’d like to see VZW man up and do what MetroPCS is doing with unlimited usage for $60

Nevertheless, according to VZW, they should have the issue resolved in 5 to 7 business days, I’m interested to see it get fixed and will report back then.

Bye Bye Goog-411

Dan — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:30:00 +0000

http://cid-0bc4c9d6d8f9371b.office.live.com/embedphoto.aspx/.Public/uvageek/GoogleMobileAppResults.PNGI’m a little saddened to read that Google is discontinuing their 411 service, however I figure that now that they the US population has freely provided millions of voices with different inflections, pronunciations and words, Google’s digital stomach is churning with information to dissect.

Nevertheless, with the capability ceasing and with smartphones a flurry, there are still ways to do voice searches on your phone without having to even make a phone call – though you will incur data charges should they apply… Checkout Google’s offerings yonder at http://www.google.com/goog411/index.html for more information. I loaded the Google Mobile App on my iPhone last night and have to say that it’s come a long way since version 1.0. If only it was as easy as just voice dialing a phone number though so as to not be distracted…

VMWare ESX 3.5i – Lenovo T61

Dan — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 22:46:03 +0000

BLUF – Attempted to load VMWare ESX 3.5i on a Lenovo T61.Â Failed to find device to write to in either AHCI or SATA Compatibility modes when attempting to use VMWare ESX Thin Installer.

So you’re not familiar with “BLUF”?Â Bottom Line Up Front…

Nonetheless, decided to attempt to pop in a spare 100 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 SATA hard drive into my Lenovo T61 Core 2 Duo laptop and attempt installation of the newly free VMWare ESX 3.5i software.Â Burned a copy of VMWare ESX 3.5i onto a CD and went from there, watching the ThinStaller make its way through the hardware compatibility list only to stop when it didn’t find the appropriate SCSI interface to load VMWare onto.

So lesson of the day – make sure that youv’e got a SCSI interface to allow VMWare ESX to continue its installation on your laptop if you’re hoping to use it as such.Â Good luck on finding a laptop with said interface

MacBook Pro or no…

Dan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 17:26:31 +0000

So I’ve been contemplating buying a MacBook Pro for a while now. And yes, I realize that there will be a hardware refresh sometime in the next six to eight months… though I also realize that in the past whenever Apple has done a hardware refresh that there are typically some small problems (warping of cases, etc.) during said releases which means that the current MacBook Pro which is nimble and quick is at the height of its refinement.

What to do… Thoughts? Recommendations? I know, go read a forum and make my own decision, but those are coming from folks that I don’t know

Now Playing – Charlie Haden – Land of the Sun – Sueno Solo Con Tu Amor (I Only Dream of Your Love)

Sync’ing Google Calendar with Mozilla Thunderbird

Dan — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:21:02 +0000

So you want to keep your desktop calendar synchronized and visualized through Mozilla Thunderbird because you just can get used to using something like Google Calendar’s web interface?

Look no further than the Lightning plugin for Mozilla Thunderbird along with the Win32 Provider add-on for Google Calendar for Lightning / Sunbird.

So how do I use them all together? Check out this blog entry…

http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239

Note that there are updated providers for Lightning and Sunbird… for the latest, check out http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/

I’m using the 0.4 version of the provider for Google Calendar with Lightning integration in Mozilla Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 with Lightning 0.8 and so far I’m liking it. The only thing that I’ve found isn’t working is the Invite Attendees functionality – otherwise, pretty tight integration.

Now Playing – Relient K – Mmhmm – When I Go Down

Panera Packet Size Limitation?

Dan — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 23:34:54 +0000

Has anyone had issues where you’re attempting to upload files through anÂ HTTP interface web method of sorts while at Panera bread and hit a package limit of 500 kilobytes?Â Just curious as I’m attempting to upload a few pictures to Flickr.com through their web site and hitting a size limit – pretty sure it’s not Panera.

I’m curious if there’s a size limit which Panera has their wireless routers set to limit the size of files that are able to be transferred via HTTP based web methods.Â Anyone else run across this?

Google Increases gMail storage limit…

Dan — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 19:08:23 +0000

So the first thing that I think of when reading through the Google Operating System last night and came across this article regarding the storage capacity of gMail and how it’s going to go to Hotmail’s limit of 5 GB and add 1 GB on top of it. Google eloquently termed this "Infinity + 1" back in the day. I like to think of it more along the "These go to 11" terminology. So they link back to the official gmail blog article regarding the increase in storage. Holy moly! Overnight I went from about 2.9 GB to 3.3 GB – wow. And what’s better, my Google Apps e-mail account now has a whopping 25 GB of e-mail storage This made me smile though:

and chuckle a little bit thinking to myself, "Dang, that’s sweet."

Emerson, Lake & Palmer – The Best of Emerson, Lake & Palmer – C’est la Vie

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 – The (in)Complete Reference

Dan — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 13:02:16 +0000

I love it when I order books off of Amazon.com before books go to press, building a library and wealth of information and knowledge to slurp up into my mind. Primarily I like the ordering before the book goes to press part, primarily because it means that I’m going to get something that I’m not quite certain of its contents before I actually get it.

So I received "The Complete Reference – Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007" by David Sterling yesterday. Looks like a decent resource, similar to the majority of other SharePoint 2007 books released recently, however there’s just one catch it’s not "complete". There are several topics that there’s nothing there on. I suppose these are the topics that I’ll continue to write about in my own book

By no means am I stating that the book is a sham, it’s actually quite good and having known David, it definitely reads like he’s writing it; additionally he really does bring together quite a bit of information that you’d have to search around for hours (maybe days) over on Microsoft’s TechNet site before you’d ever find it, especially since he’s bringing the information all together into one spot. I can only hope that my first book is somewhere close to that.

Acappella – Worship 2 – Mourning into Dancing

Amazing map of the Internet…

Dan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:05:08 +0000

So there have been several maps of the Internet generated over the years, but I definitely have to say that this one is the most clever in that it takes after the London Underground map, or at least in the same style. For the original story, hit up the Independent here.