News: testRTC Demo

I’m always wondering that there are still (even quite big) companies which rely on manual testing. I’d think that this is mainly caused by short-term orientation of majority of managers. Right, to find a bug we don’t need to have automated tests. But to verify that the system is really working this is the best way to go. At the end a good tool can save a lot of effort and a good regression suite a lot of problems 🙂

The similar idea maybe had the founders of testRTC. In the latest videos we can see demos of their tools.

News: The World is to be All-IP

Based on the recent numbers from GSMA it seems that over 50 % of the world population is now in a reach of 4G services. The number of VoLTE deployments in 2016 (May) is already close to the number of all the deployments for the year 2015.

VoLTE Deployments

VoLTE Illustrated: Beginners Guide

VoLTE is a communication standard defined by GSMA and 3GPP organizations. They created plenty of documents, but these documents are not good when one is a beginner. Still it’s no rocket science. Perhaps it is because the documents don’t contain more good pictures explaining the basic ideas. I believe if the standards would be written as comic books, they’d have much broader audience 🙂

What is VoLTE?

4G calling

• VoLTE stands for Voice over LTE. LTE is a new standard for wireless communication of high-speed data for mobile phones.
• Sometimes we can see also ViLTE, which means Video over LTE.

News: IoT and SIM – does it go together?

If you have ever come across the IMS-WebRTC integration, you know how much pain is caused, just by the fact that a web-browser is not equipped with a SIM card. With HTML5 every browser can become a terminal. But with IoT practically any device can be plugged in a big global network. So how to make sure that each such a device has all the information it needs in order to securely connect and get its services?

eUICC

One possibility is a SIM card. Although it might be an overkill for simple applications, for many it can be interesting as a quite proven and also reasonable secure option. Of course, we talk about the Embedded UICC (eUICC) for machine-to-machine devices. Already in the beginning of 2014 T-Mobile USA announced an e-SIM for M2M communications. A few days ago we got a new GSMA version of Remote Provisioning Architecture for Embedded UICC.

Anyway in my view we are just a half way through. The eUICC is still a physical device. So the it can’t be used for virtual m2m agents or the already mentioned WebRTC. And imagine that for some reason we have to replace all eUICC modules in our whole m2m solution… That’s why I’m still waiting for a so-called Soft SIM, which GSMA defines as:

A ‘Soft SIM’ would be a collection of software applications and data that perform all of the functionality of a SIM card but does not reside in any kind of secure data storage. Instead, it would be stored in the memory and processor of the communications device itself (i.e. there would be no SIM hardware layer).