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Google scores a victory for consumers

So today the American Federal Communications Commission decided to make the winner of the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auctions accept terminals and applications from 3rd-parties. This was at the suggestion of Google and others, and is excellent news for American consumers. It likely will lead to more handsets from which to choose and more innovative applications being available more quickly. Probably it also will mark the beginning of the end of the glory days for America’s incumbent mobile operators.

This ruling heralds much more difficult times for America’s coddled mobile operators. Handset choice and the ready access to innovative applications are not what they are known for. These will force them to change their current business models, which is likely to reduce their margins as well as their subscriber numbers. Their good times now have a hard stop.
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Starent 16000 PDSN MOP – Adding IP Pools

Purpose

The purpose of this Method Of Procedure (MOP) is to add ranges of IP Addresses, called “pools”, to the Starent 16000 PDSN. An IP address from an IP pool is assigned to a subscriber by the PDSN when a data session is initiated.

Procedure

Begin this procedure by creating a backup of the PDSN configuration file. Use the copy command to create a new configuration file.

[local]pdsn1# copy /flash/system.cfg /flash/system.backupfile.cfg <CR>

The file called system.backupfile.cfg is created as a contingency in the event a problem occurs during execution of this method.
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Starent 16000 PDSN Troubleshooting

I’ve been working for a couple months now to create the software infrastructure for allocating wireless data network resources based upon the product purchased by the subscriber. This means granting them access to the purchased resources, and denying access to other resources. This is one of the functions of the PDSN, in cooperation with the AAA server.
I post trouble reports and questions as they arise to the TeleTips Message Board for the Starent PDSN. Here is a step-by-step procedure for testing on the PDSN. Continue reading “Starent 16000 PDSN Troubleshooting”

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Starent PDSN

We continue working to deploy new Wireless Data plans. This week we’ve stumbled on an issue in the edge router. It does not appear to be properly detecting the OSPF routes. This problem manifests itself when the 4th octet of the IP address assigned by the PDSN to a handset exceeds “128”. Whenever a higher number gets assigned all data calls fail. Doing a stare and compare with other IP address ranges in the router shows the difference. But so far the cause cannot be explained.

Nortel has proposed flushing the OSPF cache on the PDSN with this command:

clear ip ospf process

After the command has been entered, we’ll monitor use of the use of the erring address space to see if data sessions having an IP Address above .128 succeed.