TeleTips Network

TeleTips Network Joining Forces with Telecom Voices

By Arch Stanton on August 17, 2008

We're pleased to announce that TeleTips Network is partnering with Telecom Voices, adding our voice to their coverage of Telecoms. Telecom Voices is a site dedicated to rebroadcasting blogs focused on Telecoms, allowing a wide diversity of Telecoms ideas to be found and read on a single web site. The posts of TeleTips Network will begin appearing there immediately.

It is the shared hope of Telecom Voices and TeleTips Network that this move increases the level of discussion and adds value for our mutual readers.

Give Telecom Voices a listen, and consider adding them to your daily rotation. We'll talk to you there, too!

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Method of Procedure for adding IP Pools to the Starent PDSN Wireless

By Arch Stanton on August 13, 2008

We recently had an opportunity to add an IP Pool to the Starent 16000 PDSN in our Nortel CDMA network. It is standard procedure that any network activity that has the potential to impact service must be performed during a low traffic period, (aka "the maintenance window") and must be accompanied by a written method of Procedure ("MOP".) Writing a MOP is not a very exciting activity, and in fact, takes a significant effort to get right. However, on the few occasions when the procedure went sideways, a well-written MOP was handy for resolving the issue, and in the worst cases, keeping us out of trouble in the post-mortem that followed.

Procedures that are frequently done benefit from a MOP by serving as a guideline for new engineers. Infrequently done procedures benefit by having a detailed reminder of what to, and not, do.

Read on for those details.

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Olympic Protest in New York City

By Arch Stanton on August 12, 2008

Google has caved to pressure from the International Olympic Committee and pulled a video from YouTube which shows a protest about the subjugation of a peace-loving Himilayan country by an unelected dictatorship. Here is a link to the video, thanks to Slashdot.

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Increasing Throughput on SMPP Links

By Arch Stanton on June 29, 2008

We recently began using what we call an SMS Push application. SMS Push allows us to send Text Messages to our subscribers in bulk. Typically these messages are some Marketing promotion or a Customer Service announcement. The message text and a list of MDNs is provided to the application and it sends them serially, one at a time. We wanted to speed that up.

The SMS Push application was provided by Quantum System Integrators in Costa Mesa, CA. We've worked with them on several projects before and they've always high quality software and services with excellent customer support. The application runs on Sun Solaris and is started from the shell command line. It sends a predetermined messages to each MDN in a list provided as a command-line argument. The application spawns a single instance of itself and sends the messages . Through-put has been about 1 message per second, using an SMPP link to our Primal Technologies SMS-C.

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PDSN packet inspection

By Arch Stanton on June 18, 2008

Today Nortel presented their solution for monitoring and billing high bandwidth users of the wireless broadband network. Software running directly in the Starent PDSN basically uses deep packet inspection to implement traffic shaping. The product is called Enhanced Charging Services (ECS) and it claims to provide integrated content-based billing. The solution as presently sold might not truly be called "deep" packet inspection. It only looks as deeply as layer 4, TCP and UDP packets.