Verizon iPhone

Welcome, Verizon.

It'll be interesting to see how many people jump ship from AT&T and how many people trade in various other Verizon phones for iPhones.

At the moment, AT&T and Verizon offer a Morton's Fork to the phone connoisseur: AT&T's network is fast, when it works properly, but has lots of holes, even around here (AT&T is notoriously bad in Palo Alto, for instance). Verizon's network may have somewhat better coverage, but it's as slow as EDGE for data.

Maybe it'll be better with LTE, but of course, the Verizon iPhone isn't going to do LTE (which is only fair - the first iPhone was EDGE). We'll have to wait for that for probably at least another year.

The big news is the word that the Verizon phone will include a WiFi hotspot feature. It'll be interesting to see whether AT&T will add this feature, and how they'll price it (it really should be added for free to their existing tethering feature).

What has been left unsaid so far is whether or not Facetime will be supported without a WiFi connection (that is, over CDMA data). There's a much better case to be made for restricting it on CDMA given the constricted bandwidth compared to HSUPA.

My prediction is that Verizon will offer Facetime without restriction, which will force/shame AT&T into dropping the restriction on Facetime, and AT&T will follow suit with the wifi hotspot for folks who have the tethering plan.

iPhone and IPv6

I've been a devotee of IPv6 for years now. I bought, and continue to use, an AirPort Extreme because of it's support for 6to4 and tunneling.

Long story short, I've discovered that when an iPhone with IOS 4.x is connected to a WiFi network that's got an IPv6 router serving a globally reachable prefix, it will, in fact, use it!

Here's proof: The Dancing Kame on an iPhone.



This page has logic on it to detect whether or not you are fetching it with IPv6 or not, and though you can't see the animation in the screenshot above, the text surrounding it is different than what you get over IPv4.

So, Apple.... what's stopping you from at least optionally supporting 6to4 over 3G?

Why don't they stock the good stuff?

Scarlet wants a speakerphone for the van. I did some research and I found the exact right one. Which is unusual. It's the Kensington LiquidAUX Bluetooth car kit. It's the most promising product pitch I've had: It's a speakerphone that does A2DP and has an auxiliary output (instead of an FM transmitter - we went to great trouble to get an aux port for the stereo to avoid FM transmitters). It plugs into the power port (formerly known as cigarette lighter) and has a USB power outlet.

So it's wonderful. I'm sold. I want one.

So why isn't there any in any stores nearby? I swear, it's supernatural. The one thing you want to buy is the one thing nobody ever stocks.

We'll actually have to see whether it lives up to the hype or not, but we won't know for a week because I had to buy one through the internet.

Grumble.

Are you have problems with the 3G Microcell?

So, I know I'm not the only one having a terrible experience with AT&T's 3G Microcell. If you're one of the unfortunate folks who have one of these boat anchors and it's not working, I'd suggest you join me in my campaign to spread the word.

Here's a YouTube video posted by a guy in the marketing department of Cisco, the folks who built the Microcell for AT&T.

Here's a YouTube video posted by AT&T demonstrating the setup procedure for the Microcell.

Go leave a comment on these videos. Tell them your Microcell story of pain. Maybe if enough people do this we can shame them into some kind of public response.

It's official, the 3G Microcell sucks

It's been 6 months now. It's time to take it to the streets.

Microcell report

The latest rumors about the microcell are that AT&T and Cisco are working on what sounds like a fairly major overhaul. The rumor mill is talking about a hardware upgrade, which would mean AT&T would swap out all of the units deployed so far.

That the problems that we are having with the microcell couldn't be fixed with a simple software update would be astonishing to me. From what I've read from people who have analyzed the pictures of the microcell motherboard in FCC filings, the chipsets being used certainly seem like they'd be capable of handling the workload without any trouble. The only possible problem I could imagine would be that they maybe didn't give the thing enough RAM, since the speculation is that the board is running some sort of Linux variant (specifically, BusyBox) at least at the higher levels.

A lot of the speculation has centered around the upload cap, but that doesn't quite ring true, at least for us, since the problems have always been that we got garbling on the calling party's audio, which has nothing to do with the upload data channel.

But, perhaps, the CPU gets maxed out trying to deal with audio and data at the same time. But then, wouldn't we get bidirectional garbling?

And shame on AT&T for not being more forthcoming about the problem, their plan for fixing it, and the timing of that plan. They've had plenty of time to figure out what's going on. It's one thing to sell an opaque appliance device to your customers and tell them nothing about how it works so long as it actually works. But you can't just sell a box that doesn't work and then just refuse to say anything out loud about what you're going to do.

Apple's "death touch" iPhone 4 antenna problem and the response is a stark contrast. Apple responded in less than a month with their analysis of the problem and their action plan for working around the problem. Their analysis, by their claim at least, is that the problem was/is much less widespread than has been made out, and they've said that anyone who wants one can have a free case.

AT&T, by contrast, has remained silent for months (at least) about this problem, that from all appearances is a show-stopper for huge numbers of people who have bought the device.

Oh, and they tested this thing for almost two years prior to rolling it out.

AT&T, you're making it real, real hard to stay loyal. You really are.

Microcell: Light at the end of the tunnel

It turns out that, thanks to the 3G Microcell support forum, we might have discovered an explanation for the problems we've been having with the microcell.

If, while the phone is connected up to the microcell, you have the cellular data switched on, that can cause the audio of the call to get garbled.

To test this out, I called my parents' house several times and had them recite poetry. Those calls where the cellular data was enabled suffered periods of choppy audio, and those calls where the cellular data was turned off did not.

Furthermore, while the cellular data was turned on, I turned off wifi and ran a speed test. That, however, did not induce the problem. So it's not all data use during a call that causes this problem, but only certain data. My speculation is that it has something to do with either location services or push notification.

The workaround for now is to disable cellular data while at home connected up to the microcell. This is not really a very good workaround, however, since the steps to go turn it on and off are 3 levels deep in the Settings app, and without cellular data turned on lots of capabilities of the phone are unavailable.

Hopefully, AT&T will figure out what's going on and fix it sooner rather than later.

Microcell: You're Fired!

We've had the 3G Microcell since they became available in April, and since then we've suffered three particular symptoms that have made using the phone aggravating:

1. There's an extra third to half second of latency.

2. About every fifth call or so the calling party will, at some point, vein to sound like they're speaking in tongues. This will clear up after a few seconds, or the call will drop, one of the two.

3. Sometimes when you place a call it will just immediately say "call failed" and you have to retry.

We've had a support ticket open all that time, and it just never got any better. But the very last straw was when it started shunting incoming calls straight to voicemail without ringing.

Enough is enough. I went to Fry's and bought another YX510. With that, at least the phones work properly in the house.

I really want the unlimited calling plan from home. That plan dovetails nicely with how Scarlet and I use the phones. But the device simply doesn't work. All the more surprising given that the spent almost two years in field trials.

And, apparently I'm not alone. A lot of forum posts I see make the same complaints.

Our microcell is currently exiled at a friend's house. He says it's working ok for him, for now. We'll see. But if it does wind up being a success, then it's likely because the macro network at his house is weaker than at our house. That too would dovetail with the reports I've read. So maybe the microcell works well at filling in coverage where no coverage exists, which is arguably it's purpose, but not merely as a means to offload AT&Ts macro network (and get unlimited calls in the bargain).

Apple store funnies

I was at the Apple store today and happened to pick up an iPad that was sitting there. When I woke it up, this is the image that greeted me:



I thought I was the only one that trolled at retail stores... :)

iPhone 4: FaceTime over 3G

So my nephew and I waited in line at the Valley Fair Apple store yesterday and got the new Jesus Phone. For the most part, it has been reviewed to death all over the web and I don't have a lot to add to what has already been written. Except for one thing.

FaceTime is the new video chat feature, and it works every bit as well as advertised. As was noted, the feature has been limited to WiFi only for the moment. This means that it won't work over 3G. This raises the question as to whether or not this limitation is an artificial one, or that maybe there are problems with it working over 3G.

Well, I am one of the few who can answer that categorically. I have a MiFi 2372 on AT&T. With it, and with my iPhone connected to it, I am still using the exact same HSUPA networking as the phone would have by itself, but the phone is "fooled" into dropping 3G restrictions.

I've made a few FaceTime calls this way now, and I can report that it works just as perfectly over 3G as it does when a pair of phones are in the same room sharing a wifi hotspot. Clearly the wifi only restriction has more to do with AT&T figuring out how to price the feature rather than any sort of technological limitation.

Unless AT&T is going to attempt some sort of equally artificial pricing for FaceTime, I'm not sure why they simply wouldn't price it like any other data. I mean, mobile-to-mobile calls (to other AT&T phones) are already free. So the mere switching of those calls over to data won't impact anyone's minute count.

I suppose AT&T may have wanted to avoid swamping their network with FaceTime activity on day one, but if that's true, then we should see the feature opened up for 3G sooner rather than later.

Note to Steve

Hey Steve, how's this for a "Think Different" idea:

Next time you set a pre-order date for something everybody in the goddamn world is going to want, you set it up so that for the first 24 hours the website just logs all of the order details and then processes them offline?

P.s. Isn't it just a little embarrassing when https://buyiphone.apple.com/WebObjects/IPACustomer.woa/wa/error (which is the FAIL page) can't be loaded because the server is too busy?

iPhone 4 and Arthur C. Clark

The story line in 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a moment where mankind discovers a large magnetic anomaly on the moon. This anomaly is centered on a large object that had been deliberately buried millions of years in the past. When the sun strikes the monolith, for the first time in ages, it suddenly transmits an intense radio signal. The monolith was a solar powered alarm, designed to notify its inventors when (if) the inhabitants of the Earth gained the technological ability and intellectual curiosity to find the device and dig it up.

In the story, the monolith, and the others that appear, all share the same physical description, though with varying sizes. All of them are featureless, black and have sides whose dimensions form a ratio of 1:4:9 - the squares of the first three integers.

A few posts ago, I ruminated on the iPad and how it was very similar to the pad-looking thing that Bowman and Poole watched TV on aboard the Discovery.

Now that we've all gotten a good look at the iPhone 4, I'm struck by how it too bears similarity to something in the movie - in this case, the monolith itself.

It's only a superficial similarity. The dimensions of the phone are not really 1x4x9. In fact, the phone is slightly too thin compared to the monolith. At it's 4.5 inch height, it should be half an inch thick instead of 0.37 inches. And at 2.31 inches wide it is slightly wider than the 2 inches that would make it like the monolith. That's leaving aside the stainless steel strip running around the thin edge full of buttons and ports, and the big home button on the front.

Still, I think anyone who is a fan of the movie who gets an iPhone 4 should for sure get a black one...

AT&T Microcell - work in progress

It's been a while now, and I have to admit that the Microcell has not gone as well as I would like.

You'll recall that the idea was that we could get rid of Vonage by going with the unlimited Microcell calling. By doing that, we could change the $25 we spend on the Vonage line into the $20 for the Microcell plan.

It turns out, that the potential savings is even better - we've already been able to down-shift our cell plan from the 700 minute to the 550 minute plan, saving us another $10. It turns out that between us, we only make about 200 minutes of calls per month that aren't to each other or from home.

But unfortunately, the microcell isn't yet functioning well enough to make me comfortable with shutting off Vonage.

1. Every once in a while you attempt to place a call and it just fails immediately. So you have to redial a couple times before it works.

2. Every, I'd say, 3rd or 4th phone call includes periods of time when the calling party sounds all garbled. You can recognize who they are, but it's as if they're speaking in tongues.

3. The microcell, even when it's working, introduces a good quarter second or so of latency. Much more than Vonage, and enough to cause conversational collisions that are awkward.

I've been in more or less weekly contact with an AT&T engineer for about the last month now. They're earnest and nice, but they're not really telling me that they've figured out what the problem is and how to make it better.

Now, let me just spend a moment to explain to anyone who might suggest that our Internet connection might have any impact on how well (or not) this gizmo is working: The Microcell's internet connectivity is truly the best possible scenario possible in a residential setting. Really. I'm not exaggerating in the slightest. We have AT&T's best DSL offering - 6M/768K (yes, there are higher bandwidth connections you can get, but their latency and jitter are not as good. And once you have more than about 64 kbps in bandwidth in each direction, the needs of a VoIP connection are met anyway). I've programmed our DSL router to use traffic shaping to give ports 1 and 2 priority over ports 3 and 4. Ports 1 and 2 have the Microcell and Vonage boxes plugged in, and 3 and 4 have quack.kfu.com and our Airport Extreme. If I create a very large uplink load, like a speed test, I can observe the latency on ports 3 and 4 rise into the hundreds of msec, but the latency on ports 1 and 2 only go up by 10 msec or so. So the traffic shaping is working. In addition, we have a block of static IP addresses, and both the vonage box and the Microcell have public IPs without any sort of firewall in front of them. There really cannot possibly be any better scenario unless you plugged in a Microcell in at a datacenter.

And I'm not alone, apparently. These same symptoms have been spoken of by other folks out there on the Internet and in AT&T's own customer forum.

This is the problem with being an early adopter - one winds up effectively being a guinea pig. It was like this with the DirecTV DVRs too - it took them almost a year before they were reasonably usable - and we weren't even the first folks to get them.

I am still holding out hope that they might fix it. Of course, hoping is all I can really do.

Networking pi(e)

This is a speed test through the MiFi I did while waiting for the train home at Redwood City:



Tee hee.

Data cards and SMS

This is sort of interesting. I got a 3G data modem back at the end of last year. These devices have phone numbers, though they can't make or receive traditional voice calls. They can, however, send and receive SMS messages. I don't have any use for this, so I've ignored it, but last month a text message from the Philippines, of all places, showed up. I called up AT&T and they took it off the bill (it was 42¢ for one text!) and opted-out of SMS. And that was the end of it.

Last night, just as an experiment, I loaded up the Novatel Mobilink software to use the modem in the USB mode on a Windows XP virtual machine, just to see how it would work. And after some fiddling, I did get it working.

The interesting part is that in the Mobilink UI, there was a little mailbox icon. Clicking on that took me to an SMS management UI, which showed not one but 5 text messages waiting. The other four were free texts from AT&T warning me that in January and April I was approaching, and then exceeded the usage limit of my plan (back then I was on the 200 MB/mo plan).

The interesting part is that I didn't have the MiFi back then. That means that incoming SMS messages must either be stored in the network somewhere or on the SIM.

It's sort of too bad that the MiFi can't share the unlimited text messaging we have on our two iPhones. Alas, to properly make use of it, Novatel would need to add SMS support either into the MiFi SDK (so that you could write an app or a widget to use it), or - better yet - into the MiFi's web UI (preferably behind the admin password somewhere).

3G speed testing - HSUPA

The big difference between an iPhone and the MiFi - or any other AT&T data device, for that matter - is a protocol called HSUPA. In a nutshell, HSUPA means fast uplink bandwidth. It's counterpart is HSDPA, which gives fast downloads. The iPhone has HSDPA, but lacks HSUPA. If I perform a speed test with the iPhone over 3G, then connect the iPhone up to the MiFi and repeat the exact same test, the result is that the download speed is the same for both. But in the upload direction, the difference is marked. Usually the MiFi can get an upload bandwidth of about 1-2 MB/sec, but the best I've been able to see on the iPhone is about 256 kB/sec.

Interestingly, when operating over the microcell, the uplink bandwidth is further constricted - you can only get about 64 kB/sec. That's a small enough uplink channel that it starts impinging on the acknowledgements on the downlink side, limiting how much bandwidth you can really get in that direction. But, of course, if you're near the microcell, you're within WiFi coverage anyway.

I've been taking my laptop to work and using the MiFi while on the train. It works well, but there is one AT&T dead spot between the San Antonio and California Ave stations that is troublesome. I don't particularly take this, as many would, as evidence of systemic deficiency in AT&T's network. In my view, all of the cell networks suck. They all have dead spots and none of them are in a giant hurry to fix them, it seems. But every time the phone or data card drops out, I faithfully use the "Mark the Spot" app to tell them. For what that's worth.

GPS stupidity

I had to go pick up my nephew at the MacArthur BART station today. I was in Oakland, but I didn't know exactly how to get there. So I asked the TomTom iPhone app to get me there. Now, the MacArthur BART station is located in the middle of highway 24, between the Northbound and Southbound lanes just north of I-580. That freeway is elevated, so access to the station is from ground level, underneath the freeway. Well, TomTom routed me directly past it on highway 24 and then announced "you have arrived at your destination!"

Note to the TomTom folks: "arriving" someplace doesn't count when you shoot past it at 70 mi/hr.

Whoosh!

I'm not a big fan of the iPad, but even I can see that whoever designed this device absolutely missed the point.

Bluetooth for the car

When I bought my car, I had them install the iPod integration (it was a dealer-installed option). Well, it turns out that the stupid thing emulates a CD changer, so you get no track names, you only get forward-back control, it can only deal with 6 playlists... It was substandard in every way imaginable.

Meanwhile, I was pretty happy with XM anyway. But XM is really expensive, and it's been annoying in various ways lately, so it's time for a change.

Well, I've discovered Pandora. The Pandora app works far, far better than the XM streaming app (which they charge $3 extra per month for), and has the advantage that if you don't like the song playing you can thumb it down and move to the next one immediately.

So, XM is fired.

Now, how to get Pandora everywhere I want...

Well, for the alarm clock, it's pretty easy. Just use osascript to launch the URL of the channel displayed on the channel's page. But it is a little silly using a laptop as an alarm clock. But it turns out that the Chumby supports Pandora, and it's an alarm clock. Done.

Next, the car. Well, I took my car to the local car stereo place and got them to change out the iPod integration gizmo for one that has a aux input jack. It turns out that the new gizmo also emulates a CD changer, so it's really not any better than it used to be, but with the aux input, and a Bluetooth A2DP receiver, it doesn't really matter.

For this application, the best A2DP receiver is actually the Belkin Bluetooth Music Receiver. It's a good choice because it doesn't require any button pushes to turn on. As long as it is powered from the accessory bus of the car, there's nothing to do to get it working other than tell the phone to connect to it. Finally, this device supports A2DP only - it doesn't support the handsfree or headset profile, so in principle, you can still use a headset to take any phone calls that come in while still listening to music through the car.

The only problem now is that the Belkin device is designed for home audio. So it comes with a AC power supply. Even if it had a car cord available, plugging that into the power port in the dash would be ugly. I had the car stereo folks wire in a set of Anderson PowerPole connectors in the glove box where the new Aux input plug was. So now, I just needed to go from 12 volts to 5 with the tiny coaxial power connector that mates with the jack on the device.

Radio Shack actually came through for me. The had the correct connector set up to mate with a universal power supply jack, and the related universal power supply jack on the end of a pigtail, ready to be wired to your own power supply! They also had an LM7805 5 volt regulator, and I also bought a small electrolytic capacitor to put on the input to smooth the power.

To house the whole thing, I bought a small tin of Altoids, cut a couple of slots in each end for the power input and output wires (using some electrical tape as a makeshift grommet), and a hole in the bottom to screw down the regulator (making the whole tin into a heatsink). I soldered all of the leads together and closed the tin on the wires (with knots tied in them as a strain relief) and taped it shut with electrical tape. After verifying that it worked on the bench, I installed it in the glove box. With everything hooked up, turning the volume on the stereo almost all the way up results in a little bit of alternator whine and some other distortion, but playing music at that volume would be way, way too loud. At normal volume levels, you can't hear anything bad.

MiFi 2372.... FTW!

While the old portable hotspot solution I had was nice, it wasn't very portable. The idea of taking that rig with me on the train just wasn't going to be an option. So when I heard that Novatel Wireless had an AT&T friendly HSUPA network quad-band MiFi available, I decided to look into it.

AT&T doesn't offer the 2372. The only reason I can think of why they wouldn't is that perhaps Verizon negotiated some sort of exclusivity with Novatel. You CAN get the 2372 from either Bell Canada or Rogers... if you don't mind moving to Canada.

But that doesn't really matter. Because I already bought the Quicksilver card, I'm on a subsidized contract with AT&T anyway. Even if AT&T sold them, I'd have to buy one at full price.

So Google to the rescue. You can find places on the Internet that sell the 2372, and if you don't mind having the device airmailed to you from the Ukraine, you can get a reasonably good price.

The device itself is slightly smaller than an iPhone 3G/3GS. It has one button on the front that turns it on and off. It has a micro USB connector on the back for charging and for use with a single device without WiFi. In this mode, the device appears exactly like a standard USB 3G modem. It even can be used in Snow Leopard as a standard wireless WAN device.

There's only one problem I have had with the device so far. Its built-in DHCP server refuses to respond if you have a DHCP Client ID configured:



You have to leave the DHCP client ID space blank or you won't get an address configured. The other minor issue is that the router doesn't support uPNP or NAT-PMP, so the Back-to-my-Mac pane of the MobileMe control panel complains that it can't be reached by your other registered machines. This might mean other issues as well for apps as well if they require setting up port maps and stuff like that. Of course, IPv6 would be the perfect fix... someday.

When you're connected to the device, you can connect to http://www.mifi/ to get status on or reconfigure the device. This is also the place where you can talk to the file sharing component that serves up the files on a card in the microSD slot. I haven't tried that feature of the device, however.

Lastly, the device purports to have a GPS receiver built-in that allows you to query for location information. Unfortunately, it requires cooperation from the carrier to allow it to be turned on, and only the Sprint MiFi currently has this feature enabled.