From peter at stuge.se  Tue Nov 29 23:07:04 2011
From: peter at stuge.se (Peter Stuge)
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:07:04 +0100
Subject: POC und mobile auf 28c3
Message-ID: <20111129230704.23789.qmail@stuge.se>

Hi Sascha!

First of all a big thank you to you and your team for your support at
27C3 and at camp!

For 28C3 we would very much like to peer with you again, and we work
on being more structured this time, to be a better partner for
eventphone and a better provider for the users.

One part of this is the osmocom-event-orga at lists.osmocom.org mailing
list[1], which can be used to reach people who should be in the know
about the organization of mobile phone communications at events.

We will attempt to provide mobile-cluey staff to join in a helpdesk
function, but I am not convinced that this will be consistent.
Andreas (jolly) has offered to work on mobile helpdesk, but IMO one
or two people is not enough by far to run a mobile helpdesk
comfortably. I think we would need more like five people, and we
simply aren't that many..

To compensate for this, our idea is to give POC direct access to the
OpenBSC instance that is running the GSM network, as well as
neccessary training, e.g. before the event on a wiki page, and during
the event in person, on how to monitor the network, check the status
of a subscriber, submit SMS directly, etc.

In addition, we want to be more available for your helpdesk, in
person as far as we can, but at the very least electronically (IRC,
jabber, DECT, ...) in case of any need for assistance.

The network will consist of 6 ip.access nanoBTS units installed
throughout the bcc, and unlike the Nokia MetroSite we used at camp
these BTSes are somewhat well tested, and should run fairly stable as
long as we don't enable GPRS (we might enable it at night for testing
though) - the only known incompatibility is with some HTC Desire
phones, which send a USSD request on startup which OpenBSC currently
doesn't support.

Of course we are happy to contribute some money to the POC coffee
fund from SIM card sales profit. All old SIM cards will continue to
work. New SIM cards sold will likely be sysmoSIM[2] since there
aren't too many magicSIM available. The primary user-visible
difference is that sysmoSIM comes with PIN and PUK, both printed on
the card, and the PIN is required to log on to the card. The
procedure for subscribers to join the network will otherwise be
identical to the procedure at camp.


Please give us some feedback on these ideas! We want to improve the
mobile phone experience for everyone involved, users as well as
operations. In particular please also let us know if you have ideas
that we haven't thought of!


Kind regards,

//Peter & Holger (Harald is also on the list)

[1] http://lists.osmocom.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/osmocom-event-orga
[2] http://shop.sysmocom.de/products/sysmosim