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The Telecom Digest
Tuesday, December 06, 2022

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Copyright © 2022 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.
Volume 41 Table of Contents Issue 276
T-Mobile allegedly loading code from random trackers into customer portal; likely causing F451 Service Unavailable error?
‘Un-carrier’ T-Mobile Makes a Very Verizon, AT&T ‘Carrier’ Move
NJ: ‘I have no faith in them’: T-Mobile tower still matter of dispute in North Haledon
New Character set for the Digest
Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem?
Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem?
Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem?
Message-ID: <20221205135951.GA965671@telecomdigest.us> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 13:59:51 +0000 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: T-Mobile allegedly loading code from random trackers into customer portal; likely causing F451 Service Unavailable error? By Zohaib Ahmed Original story (published on May 13, 2021) follows: Several T-Mobile subscribers are bumping into the F451 Service Unavailable error when trying to access the customer portal, particularly when logging in, and they’re confused as to why. After all, F451 is a clear reference to Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 – with 451 degrees Fahrenheit as being the temperature at which paper catches fire spontaneously. https://piunikaweb.com/2022/12/05/t-mobile-f451-service-unavailable-error-likely-caused-due-to-trackers/
Message-ID: <20221205141349.GA965708@telecomdigest.us> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 14:13:49 +0000 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: 'Un-carrier' T-Mobile Makes a Very Verizon, AT&T 'Carrier' Move Mobile carrier companies are always eager to increase revenue through fees customers pay and to outflank their competition with deals. By Jeffrey Quiggle Former T-Mobile (TMUS) - Get Free Report CEO John Legere in 2013 introduced the mobile carrier company's "uncarrier" program. This move primarily freed customers from being locked into two-year contracts with their cell phone companies. https://www.thestreet.com/retailers/t-mobile-adds-fee-that-feels-like-att-or-verizon-mov
Message-ID: <20221205135544.GA965634@telecomdigest.us> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 13:55:44 +0000 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: NJ: 'I have no faith in them': T-Mobile tower still matter of dispute in North Haledon By Philip DeVencentis NORTH HALEDON — A dispute over a cell tower between the borough and one of the nation’s largest wireless carriers may drag into the new year as the mayor said he has refused to sign an agreement to end the feud. At issue is the 150-foot lattice tower erected at the public works yard on Willow Brook Court. Officials said they tried for months to get T-Mobile U.S. Inc. to acknowledge that it owns the tower and to take it down. Because that did not happen, the borough sued the telecom giant in state Superior Court in Paterson to force the removal in July. https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/passaic/north-haledon/2022/12/05/t-mobile-north-haledon-nj-continue-dispute-cell-site-removal/69688793007/ -- (Please remove QRM to reply to poster)
Message-ID: <20221205193612.GA967385@telecomdigest.us> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 19:36:12 +0000 From: Bill Horne <malQRMassimilation@gmail.com> Subject: New Character set for the Digest After consulting with experts and much thought, I've decided to change the Digest's "default" character set to UTF-8. Since UTF-8 in now the default character set for most emails, it's both reasonable and realistic to make it the default for an email-based publication such as the Telecom Digest. The ISO-8859-1 character set we used to use doesn't have some of the accented characters and commercial symbols which are now in common use: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1 for details. More importantly, ISO-8859-1 isn't readily available as a choice on many popular email clients. There are some exceptions to the usual uses that UTF-8 is put to:, and they are covered in the F.A.Q., which will be reissued and sent in a separate email, in a day or two. For example, The Digest won't allow UTF-8 "Subject" lines, since they can cause problem with the automated process of sorting incoming posts into various files, unless it's required to present accented characters in a person's name or the name of a city. Bill Horne Moderator
Message-ID: <2ImjL.50087$KVI.37140@fx14.iad> Date: 5 Dec 2022 08:51:59 -0500 From: "Michael Trew" <michael.trew@att.net> Subject: Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem? On 12/4/2022 17:31, Bill Horne wrote: > As most of my readers know, I've been dissatisfied with Verizon Mobile, > and the way it has demanded that those like my wife, who had “4G” phones > which were not “4G” enough to suit their taste, buy new cell phones to > enable her to keep paying exorbitant amounts of money to Verizon Mobile > so she can “enjoy” the “benefits” of something called “volte” - whatever > that may be. Since I mentioned T-Mobile in a prior post, I should note that T-Mobile is also requiring VoLTE now. From my understanding, VoLTE means "voice over LTE"... phones without this capability, even if they are 4G phones, cannot make voice calls over the 4G network (voice always falls back to 2/3G) -- only data goes over 4G. Perhaps this means that Verizon truly is retiring CDMA for good at the end of December. ***I still use an absolutely ancient Nokia 3395 via T-Mobile's network... it works on 2G only. It's still functional, but it remains to be seen when they will shut the network down.
Message-ID: <94408739-414d-b2c0-572a-daf72217b923@interisle.net> Date: 5 Dec 2022 09:36:24 -0500 From: "Fred Goldstein" <fred@interisle.net> Subject: Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem? On 12/4/2022 5:31 PM, Bill Horne wrote: > > As most of my readers know, I've been dissatisfied with Verizon > Mobile, and the way it has demanded that those like my wife, who had > “4G” phones which were not “4G” enough to suit their taste, buy new > cell phones to enable her to keep paying exorbitant amounts of money > to Verizon Mobile so she can “enjoy” the “benefits” of something > called “volte” - whatever that may be. > VoLTE is Voice over LTE. It means that your voice call is carried on the LTE network rather than on the old CDMA network (or whatever that carrier used to use, like GSM if it's T-Mobile). While I am never one to defend Verizon, in this case they're right. The brilliant folks at 3GPP who invented LTE, which for the record is /incredibly/ complex, had the weird notion that the folks over in the TCP/IP world, who worked on that sexy Internet thingy, were somehow brighter than them, and therefore they had to do everything in LTE using TCP/IP. Which was bad enough, since TCP/IP is a terrible kludge held together with lots of bailing wire and Moore's Law spit. Now in the TCP/IP world there are at least three ways to carry voice. Enterprise systems do so by running a shim layer below IP, usually MPLS, which provides a quality-assured connection (btw that last word is a red flag to an IP fanatic, for silly historical reasons) to the IP flow within it. Low-tier consumer VoIP services (like Vonage) simply "send and pray" that the "best efforts" (scare quotes required) IP delivery mechanism of the public Internet doesn't lose so many packets that the voice is garbled. The third way is an early 2000s idea called IMS, IP Multimedia Subsystem, which has the simplicity of a Rube Goldberg contraption. Essentially it tries to monitor all TCP flows in order to make sure there's room for the voice flow. (The original idea around 2002 was to be able to bill for them.) It had largely been abandoned elsewhere when 3GPP adopted it as the way to run voice over LTE. So come 2010 or so, LTE cells were popping up all over the place, but VoLTE was still being worked on, since IMS is the 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle of networking and was layered atop the 1000-piece puzzle of LTE. Hence all "LTE" phones of that era retained their underlying carrier's 3G (or 2G) voice protocol while using LTE for data. Which on a flip phone ain't much, but hey it was in the chipset so the phone could be labeled LTE. And this did finally let Verizon use SIM cards, which were invented for GSM and which the GSMA had essentially banned CDMA networs from using. So your wife's ancient flip phone is not VoLTE but CDMA for voice, and the CDMA network is being shut down since she is one of the last two dozen or so people in the country regularly using it. And you need a phone that has VoLTE, which has been running for probable over a decade by now. This isn't any con-spee-waaah-see by Verizon, it's just routine product evolution, like current software no longer supporting Windows XP machines or PowerPC Macs. -- Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net Interisle Consulting Group +1 617 795 2701
Message-ID: <17a49f01d9c88c5273f042d15719b648.squirrel@hallikainen.org> Date: Mon, 5 Dec 2022 10:19:06 -0700 From: "Harold Hallikainen" <harold@hallikainen.org> Subject: Re: Am I the Only One Who Sees a Problem? This seems like the perfect opportunity to look at Verizon's competitors. Are they more competitive? I suspect the only way to change their behavior is to have large numbers of their customers move to other carriers. Harold https://w6iwi.org
End of The Telecom Digest for Tue, 06 DEc 2022
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