What’s in a number?
+44 What’s in a number?
The line between IoT (Internet of Things) and Voice is at times becoming blurred, especially in the world of Social Care. The always-on nature of IoT is great for collecting data through Movement sensors, Heat and Smoke detectors or fall detectors. But sometimes the simplest thing to do is to talk the person you are trying to support.
A properly set up roaming SIM can add to that IoT reliability by allowing the device to roam onto multiple networks, making the connection more robust. The downside can be that to phone that unit you have to dial a foreign number +46, +353 etc. These numbers tend to cost more and as a result some phones or systems may be banned from dialling them.
+44 Roaming numbers appear to solve both problems- they can roam, and they are cheap to call. The networks though have closed this loophole, now they can pick out Jersey, Guernsey and Manx numbers that start +44 and still charge the higher rates associated with an ‘overseas’ provider.
So, make sure you know what your Mobile Originated (MO) and Mobile Terminated (MT) costs are going to be from the outset and don’t assume that because it’s +44 it will okay.
For more information about IoT Profile roaming SIMs contact [email protected] or call us on +44 1530 511 180
Fridge Mounts Cyber Attack!
The idea of breaking the Internet using your fridge sounds like a rejected script from the IT Crowd. And yet it has already happened! It is called a Distributed Denial of Service Attack (DDoS). The idea is to simply clog up a service by making lots of requests to your server that it is so busy rejecting those requests it can no longer do the work you intended it to do.
DDOS turns the argument about protecting your system on its head; using huge numbers of remote devices with weak security to mount an attack on other systems. Its distributed nature makes it that much harder to combat even after the attack has begun.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/internet-of-things-corporate-cyberattacks-2016-10
Mobius has been arguing that the need for security in Internet of Things (IoT) is as great as it was with Machine to Machine (M2M) before it, if not greater. The idea that any device could sit on internet unprotected and it would be safe because it was mobile always seemed very odd to us.
https://mobiusnetworks.wpengine.com/blog/blog/how-secure-is-mobile
Mobius are the only company that can run an entire end to end connection entirely off internet so this kind of attack couldn’t happen.
But there are other ways to protect your system that still means you have all the advantages of using Mobile and using the Internet but are still safe – from external attacks, from peer-to-peer attacks and even from SIM level Denial of Service (DofS) attacks.
Building such a system can be tailored to your requirements and might cost less than you think. A private network also boosts reliability and improves real time diagnostics. It makes the system better and safer. Why us? Mobius has got more experience of building these private mobile networks than the rest of the IoT MVNOs put together.
Contact us to find out how we can help. [email protected] or call us on +44 1530 511 180
Security on SIM
“Why would somebody want to take the SIM out and use it?” was a question I was asked by somebody who was not a Mobius customer.
“Because it is free.” Was the simple answer. It still seemed a surprise despite the fact that he had been presented with an overage bill of just under £130,000 for one month. Although this bill was spread over about 20 SIMs it still represents the largest fraudulent use I have personally seen.
Any discussion of Security should start with the SIM and yet it is generally overlooked. There is a great deal of investment in Software to restrict the sites a user can visit, apps they can download or films they can stream. But all the end user has to do is take the SIM out and put it in something else and they have sidestepped all that security.
Some companies go to great lengths to physically isolate the SIM from a hostile outside world. But we have seen a ticket machine with 17 screws between the user and the SIM stripped down in less than half an hour of first being turned on. Once people know there is a free SIM to be had it is amazing the lengths people will go to. Well, it is free!
In Johannesburg the story goes that someone ran over a Smart Traffic Light System (or Robot as they are known locally) and spotted that it was a SIM controlling data to the traffic lights. Within weeks all the SIMs had been stripped out crippling the traffic lights and racking up cost for the city.
http://joburg.org.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6068&catid=88&Itemid=266
Mobius believes that every SIM is a blank cheque which is why we offer to tie them down for our customers. You choose the level of security that’s appropriate;
Can’t visit certain websites, or can only visit the ones you want.
Can only visit your server or can’t access the internet at all
Will only work in your hardware or even only work in that particular device
And that security can be flexible. If you want a SIM that will work entirely offnet on a private network with fixed IP but needs to access the BBC News tickertape every 15 minutes we can build that for you. There are also the simple things like;
And all of that security is on the SIM, no special software or hardware required. And it follows the SIM wherever it goes. So please take security seriously, contact Mobius at the usual address [email protected] and find out how we can help.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
Mobius has worked hard for over ten years to build a reputation for quality and innovation. In terms of Quality, we are still the only Airtime supplier to be both ISO 9001:2008 accredited as well as the credit card industry standard PCI DSS. In innovation our list of industry firsts is impressive and still being added to.
A measure of how far our service has come is the chart where we measure our delivery to our customer against a network directly and we show a consistently better performance. There are few, possibly no other MVNOs that can produce that kind of material. This isn’t down to luck it’s down to the hard work of all of the team and consistent investment in the company that means that our 4th generation private links are still running at below 15% capacity.
With the arrival of 4G in M2M or IoT applications careful design comes even more to the fore. Stepping away from the limitation of Mobile Broadband (MBB), Retail or Consumer SIMs also means leaving the safety net of fair usage and hard stops. A handful of 4G SIMs can overwhelm the classic private network architecture. It’s why Mobius developed ALPs and is now starting its 2nd generation before the competition have understood the benefits of the first.
It is recognition of this that our competition has started to tell their customers that it’s a Mobius SIM they are offering. Or a in at least one case a Mobius architecture. This brings a warm glow to our hearts and a vindication that there really can be a better SIM, there is a value proposition for better airtime.
However, at the risk of sounding like a cereal manufacturer, if it doesn’t say Mobius on the outside, it is not going to be Mobius on the inside. If you value the data that you are sending over mobile enough to see value in Mobius then please give us a call on +44 1530 511 180 or contact [email protected]
Cost of ownership – the profile
In the internet there is an idea that access should be ubiquitous and fair. For some reason the same thought process seems to be expected of the Mobile Operators which is odd when you think about it. These are commercial private networks that we buy access to. Why would that access be fair? It is difficult to think of another system that doesn’t offer a hierarchy of service and costs and nobody would think twice about it. Rightly or wrongly that’s just the way the world works.
There are three main groups of profiles in Mobile; Voice, Mobile Broadband (MBB) and Machine to Machine (M2M).
Voice is the one we all understand. It is almost certainly the one you would have in your phone. Because the networks have a very good picture of what a consumer does with her phone it well supported and very cost competitive. Problems arise when a Voice SIM is used in a Machine-to-Machine application. For example, the network may automatically disconnect a SIM if it hasn’t made a voice call in three months. This may seem a reasonable threshold in a consumer application but if the unit is in a payment terminal, then it will never make a call. The remote units all drop offline and nobody can tell you why.
Mobile Broadband would seem the obvious solution to this as it is clearly only intended to send data. But the networks are expecting this to be in a USB dongle used in a café to check the news and your emails. As a result, MBB have a ‘fair usage policy’ which means that your content is filtered and compressed creating lag, lost data and possible rejection. It also means that if you are trying to maintain a 24/7 connection that may put you in breach of the profile. That means that the network can force you off network because you are in breach of your profile. If you do manage to stay on with a MBB SIM, you then you then might find that ‘Throttling’ comes in to play. Which is that even if you are the only one connected to that mast at 2 in the morning you still only get 56kbps because that’s all your profile will allow you to do.
Proper M2M SIMs then don’t have voice flags, filtering, compression, hard limits or throttling. That comes at a price literally. The networks know that you want to stay on all the time, to send or receive uncompressed data and to send data as fast at the end of the month as at the beginning. That means an M2M SIM will use up more network resources than a Voice profile or even an MBB. The networks charge for that use.
Which is why a lot of resellers either knowing or not still sell MBB or even Voice for a M2M application. It cuts the ticket price they know the customer will buy on.
Buying the wrong profile SIM drives up the cost of ownership as you try and unpick why the system isn’t working this time. And fault finding, if you’re not in a fully resourced M2M system, can very time consuming and frustrating. Which all adds to the cost of ownership.
Cost of ownership – the SIM
Cost of ownership may not seem that obvious in something like airtime. A SIM is a SIM and one network very much like another. So, the idea that it would be worth paying more for such a commodity product seems counter-intuitive.
But the networks do behave very differently. The connections themselves have different rules applied to them and even the physical SIMs themselves have different properties which can impact their Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF).
If we take that last point first. At Mobius we have been publishing the physical spec of the SIM that we have been supplying for nearly 6 years. The key parameters are the temperature range of the SIM, the cache size for network messages and the read write cycles of the on-board memory.
Temperature range may not be seem applicable. Obviously if it is extremely cold; for example, a payment terminal in a ski resort, or a tracking unit in a snow blower it will have a direct impact. The plastic substrate of the SIM will twist itself into a butterfly shape with such force that will destroy everything around it. The heat of an oil pipe monitoring system on the other hand hastens the aging of the electronic circuit shortening its useful life.
Most applications, even M2M applications will be in relatively benign environments if only for the sake of all the other electronics around the SIM. However, temperature range still plays a part because the smaller the temperature range of the SIM the more sensitive that SIM will be to normal temperature cycles, the faster it will age and the quicker it will need to be replaced.
Cache size is really just the onboard memory. If there are changes in the network some networks need to keep the SIM up to date with how to connect, what permissions it has, perhaps when access it is allowed. Sometimes this update is in the form of a text which can cause its own problems if your designer is unaware this can happen. These messages are then stored and since it doesn’t figure in most people’s thinking there is no mechanism for clearing the memory. Once the cache is full it can no longer update itself and the SIM is rejected when it attempts to connect to the network. It then needs to be replaced.
Lastly the read/write cycles of the on-board Electronically Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory (EEPROM) usually (and erroneously) called Flash. This kind of memory simply has a finite span. Each time your device connects essentially that SIM loses a life. Cheap SIMs can have a 30k read/write cycle. The ones that Mobius supply are around half a million.
None of these are really issues that impact on voice. If the SIM in your phone gets tired cold or forgetful the Operator will send you a new one out, next day, for free. Problem solved.
It’s when that unit is on a gantry above the M1 and this is the third time in two years that you have had to spend £5000 to swap it out that the quality of the SIM provided has to form part of your thinking, not about the ticket price but about the cost of ownership.
Cost of ownership – the network
‘All the networks are the same.’ is a surprisingly common opinion. The confusion has been deepened by the various mast sharing deals that have been done over the years. Just as with Profiles and SIMs – if they are all the same why pay any more?
When you send the AT Command “Connect” to your 3G Engine there is little notion of what lies behind that command in terms of the software, firmware and hardware on your
Networks are very complex and becoming increasingly so with each passing quarter. The amount of data that they used to transmit in a month, they now transmit in a lunch time. So, they can’t afford to be standing still. We recently built a completely private network for a customer with no internet paths at all. There were 15 hops between the remote devices and the customers final destination. If you include the construction of the device itself that adds another two. And that is the just to get the clients firewall, what lay behind that was a whole other story.
Capacity is another key part of the story. If someone was to say to you that the network was congested, you would assume that they were describing the over air part of the connection. But there is also the pipe from the mast to GGSNs, the backbone infrastructure, the breakout points onto the internet or now in many cases the load on the private networks of your MVNO. If there is a capacity issue, how do you know where the failure actually lies?
Understanding that complexity is key to delivering a reliable solution. It is shocking that 10 years in to M2M there are still vendors out there who when faced with a disruption in service will shrug their shoulders and say “it must be the network.” There is no other facet of IT where that kind of response would be considered acceptable.
It is possible to trace all the way through a mobile network but the people who can do it effectively can be counted on the fingers of one hand. The tools to provide the detail, sifting through billions of records an hour, are expensive to build and very expensive to maintain. But such tools and people are only of use if you are sure that you have the fundamental building blocks of the system are in place.
What kind of SIM with what profile is sending data though what hardware? Does the network have any pinch points in all the many links in the chain to deliver the data? Is there overloading in the chain pushing up loss or latency. And, given that there maybe twenty system suppliers in the system, does each understand their part enough to ensure not just that their part is set ‘right’ but that the whole works.
The price of the SIM is only one brick in the tower that needs to be built.
Pareto rule
Data Sims are up to 10% of your costs but can create 80% of your problems
Many people with experience of implementing mobile in their product will tell you that reliability and technical support are poor, and visibility is non-existent. It was that frustrating experience that made us start Mobius. By using the best available SIMs, networks, backhaul and technical support, Mobius has built a Smart Multi Path Mobile Network (SMMN) that’s fit for purpose and operates around the world on 364 service providers.
What our customers tell us is that we offer levels of operational excellence, unmatched by any of
our competitors, with the most reliable platform in the sector and the lowest downtime
In talking to many of our customers, we have come up with a master wish list of what they have told us they are looking for in their “ideal” data SIM supplier and this is shown in the check list link.
Whether what’s important to you is cost, reliability, accurate billing, capped overage, the adherence to demanding SLAs, dual location disaster recovery or the assurance given by BSI ISO9001:2008 and PCI DSS accreditation, Mobius puts a tick in the box. What we urge you to do is come up with your own wish list and calibrate your short list of suppliers as to who can best meet your needs against your requirements using the attached master grid.
I have no doubt that we could exceed any realistic expectations that you might have of an airtime supplier, and we look forward to the opportunity of trialling our service to allow you to benchmark our performance against your incumbent airtime provider. Ask for a quote now.
Working SIMs
We had three interesting confirmations of our mantra that “Not all SIMs are the same” this week. One was in regards to an old customer of ours who had gone through a cycle of alternative suppliers for the last five years. Luckily, they also retained our estate so were happy to take our samples for a new project that they have been planning for some time. While they all looked good in the bench tests when it came to field trials only one set worked, the ones from Mobius. In this case the term ‘work.’ is simply defined; the data was sent and received from multiple European connections in a repeatable manner.
Often though ‘work’ is more complex.
In one case the client had two Vodafone SIMs provided by two different VAR’s side by side in a door access system. In one unit the Vodafone SIM worked and in the other it didn’t. Both were connecting successfully through a private IP network and were reported by both suppliers as ‘working’. But one door opened, and one door didn’t.
It turned out that the data going through one private network was taking around 800ms to deliver its message while the Mobius SIM, in the same kit, on the same network, was delivering the data in around 80ms. We can speculate as to why, but the key here is that although both providers could say that their solution did ‘work’ only one was fit for purpose.
The final case, actually from last week, was regarding availability. This can be measured in lots of ways and has lots of parameters but put simply- if a customer needs to know where something is, continuously in real time then the system can only be described as working if it is sending the data, sending it quickly and available continuously.
This last parameter is really tough. You will have seen elsewhere that we delivered 99.995% availability for Slough County Council and their traffic light system (SCOOT). But this application was a moving one in a huge variety of environments from one end of the UK to the other. Apparently as a result we had sporadic but regular 3-minute gaps in network. In terms of the customer expectation, it didn’t ‘work’ despite meeting the first two criteria.
I’m pleased to say that with a lot of hard work and strong co-operation by all parties we now have eliminated those gaps. The SIM and indeed the whole system around it now ‘work’. A process I hope to detail in a case study soon.
In all three cases though if the parties involved had said that the reason for failure was due to a faulty SIM or that “it must be the network” and shrugged their shoulders then the systems our clients were trying to deploy would never ‘work’. Which is why a SIM can’t just be a SIM.
Buyer beware
Buyer beware is such an old and consistent warning that the Latin version ‘Caveat emptor’ is still part of everyday speech. It is very easy when going through the buying process to speed read the supporting contract and then sign it on the basis that they “are all the same”. Perhaps worse is to spot something and then when the salesman says, “But we never enforce that.” allow it to stay in the contract.
In the world of airtime contracts are king. This is especially true if you are a couple of years down the line and few or none of the original parties are still working for the companies involved. The simple fact is irrespective of intent and the discussions around the signing point if your contract states:
‘On termination or expiry of the agreement for any reason, the customer shall as soon as is reasonably practical deliver to us or at our option destroy all or any SIM cards.’
Then that is what you are bound to do.
We know of several large M2M companies who are now caught in the dilemma of being unhappy with their current provider because of congested private networks, lack of technical support or poor customer service but find that the contract forces them to physically swap the SIM if they move provider despite being on the same network.
Those SIMs are now buried in trucks on different continents or in meters scattered all over the country. Recover may be difficult, it will certainly be expensive. Which is why the clause is there- nobody leaves.
This compounds those companies view that their experience of M2M is poor with a sense now of being trapped in that under-performing relationship. Will those companies still embrace M2M in their next product or service? It seems unlikely, which damages us all.
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