justen burdette

wireless geek.

[mobi @Mobi]

most of our team are here in hawaiʻi, but we have amazing folks in canada, méxico, and brasil that are integral to mobi.

building better wireless (maybe surprisingly?) isn’t rocket science. nor are we experts in international diplomacy + the complexities of global trade, by any stretch of the imagination…

but it is hard to not worry that imposing new tariffs on our two closest allies + trading partners will inevitably, and quickly, lead to significant inflation. and have a profoundly negative impact on the north american economy as a whole that will touch all of our lives in ways we can’t even begin to fully calculate (although economists undoubtedly will try).

together, the u.s., canada, and méxico are ahead of the e.u. by just a $4 trillion hair, ($32t vs $28t) in the purchasing power parity of our combined gross domestic product. the usmca, and nafta before it, certainly are not perfect. but bettering the partnership we have spent generations building makes so much more sense than tearing it all down, surely?

we hope our leaders are able to figure out a way forward from this that strengthens, rather than weakens, each of our three countries and what we have built together: peace, prosperity, and the largest trading bloc + economic partnership in the world.

[eSIM @esim]

eSIM is literally transformative. 🤓

[Tim Cook @tim_cook]

Today, we honor President Carter’s lifetime of service and his commitment to leaving the world better than he found it. May he rest in peace.

[Delta @Delta]

Every time Jimmy Carter flew Delta, he shook hands with each person on the plane. Because that's who he was. Someone who treated people as people.

[Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris]

There is an adage: Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.

I know many people feel like we are entering a dark time. For the benefit of us all, I hope that is not the case. But, America, if it is: Let us fill the sky with the light of a billion brilliant stars.

[justen burdette @justen]

My father passed away when I was very young. But seeing how much genuine love Gus Walz has for his parents and his sister, and the pride he felt being able to be there for his dad as he accepted the Democratic nomination for Vice President of the United States?

Let’s just say, he wasn’t the only one with tears in his eyes. And no matter your political stripes, you truly *are* weird if you can’t see and appreciate the joy and sincerity in that moment.

@Tim_Walz and his family are clearly just good, honest, down to earth folks — whether you agree or disagree with every one of his policy positions. How could you not be grateful that they are willing to make the real, and sometimes painful sacrifices necessary to seek to serve our country in public office (as evidenced, no less, by some of the truly abhorrent nonsense folks have already spewed towards Gus — who, despite still being a kid, clearly has far more compassion and maturity than far too many of our “leaders” today).

And, yes, for the Governor and his family, this is *further* sacrifice, as if the first 24 years serving our country in uniform, then as an educator, and then as a Congressman and Governor weren’t enough.

I know what it was like to be proud of my mom and everything she overcame and fought for, and I still feel that now years after she’s been gone. I would trust Gus, Hope, Gwen, and Tim in a heartbeat over anyone that either can’t understand or that chooses to mock love and pride.

[President Biden Archived @POTUS46Archive]

The people of Maui will always remain in my heart and prayers.

Together, we've made real progress.

The voices of those who have called the island home for generations will continue to guide the work ahead as we remain focused on supporting their ongoing recovery.

[justen burdette @justen]

I’m a huge fan of your work, and if you knew how many of your blog posts I still have bookmarked from trying to figure out early VoLTE/IMS/SIP/SMPP/etc. quirks, you’d probably send me an invoice. 😅

For the use cases you’ve mentioned (and then some), Wi-Fi alone obviously doesn’t cut it, and obviously that was the motivation behind Facebook to initially fund Magma, and I imagine, a driver for a lot of these projects.

Being able to build and manufacture proper SIM profiles, carrier bundles (as you mentioned), etc. have long been really tough barriers to entry unless you’re talking about an operator with a bare minimum of many tens of thousands of subscribers (and, I don’t think the potential of that would get you much traction nowadays — you need to commit to much larger numbers if you’d be starting from scratch in the U.S., I’d imagine).

We’ve talked with Sukchan about eventually making it easy for atypical operators to use a subset of our IMSIs, with a functional eSIM profile, voice and messaging (numbering, origination, termination), domestic and international roaming, etc. to make it easier for folks to potentially quickly stand up a functional core for internal private 5G, at least in the U.S. (our international roaming rates aren’t great everywhere, and obviously our existing numbering wouldn’t make sense elsewhere). But one or two of the big multicountry operator groups, and/or even a handful of the more innovative operators, coming together to do that (at least wherever unlicensed/shared spectrum is possible) would be huge.

Maybe too huge, such that it would be scary for a traditional operator to even wrap their brains around? 😬

[justen burdette @justen]

We get a surprising amount of folks (for our size, imo) reaching out about private wireless. I doubt that we are ever the first carrier folks have called, or even talked with, and some have even gone shockingly far down the rabbit hole elsewhere before, inevitably, running into roadblocks.

So much of the cellular stack just wasn’t designed for anything other than massive scale, and the commercials are designed around that from start to finish.

When we first set out to rebuild our core from the ground up, there weren’t really any options that made sense, even at the scale of a regional operator. (Pretty much all the regional MNOs that exist today have been around for a long time, and the trajectory of those numbers in the U.S. has been trending progressively downward since the wireless Big Bang, despite the number of customers and connected devices going in the upward direction just as linearly for the first few decades.)

We eventually found WG2, now part of @Cisco, and I’m grateful (and we’re lucky) we did. They’re a scrappy group of folks that are now building just as amazing innovations from inside a company that understands both startups and scale — just now with a lot more resources to do that building. 🤓

But before WG2, we began paying attention to some of the open source cores out there like Open5GS, Magma, Free5GC, and OMEC. We eventually became a sponsor of Open5GS (and we’ve continued supporting their project since — I believe we became their largest continuing sponsor last year).

Open5GS and each of the other projects have their own particular focus, and they’re all doing really fascinating things, but I think private 5G and IoT, in particular, are areas where there are a lot of possibilities thanks to these projects.

We’re working to use Open5GS, for example, to test complex roaming, coverage, and network configuration edge cases that aren’t practical or possible to quickly test in production. But there are production networks running on open source cores already, today (especially in the WISP world).

Dish has driven a lot of innovation and fueled a lot of the depth that we now see with OpenRAN.

Companies like RiPSIM, 10T Tech, NetLync, 1Global, and others are removing a lot of the barriers that used to exist for standing up a wireless carrier. And although “nobody gets fired for choosing IBM/Xerox” has just-as-strong, if not stronger, parallels in wireless — and that same mindset certainly exists for a lot of folks interested in private wireless, I do think there’s a spark there.

That spark is enough for me to hold out hope that there could be a renaissance for the regional carrier ecosystem. The overlap there is huge, and all it would take is a little momentum…

[justen burdette @justen]

And while anyone can (and should) ask why I care and why @mobi cares, I can tell you three things:

a.) We didn’t have any gear in our core or network that was impacted, although we did upgrade from a legacy Nortel core to a modern, scalable, secure, cloud-based mobile core from @CiscoSP360. We aren’t owed anything under the program.

b.) We are a member of @CCAmobile, and through the CCA, we know plenty of small operators that *are* impacted. These folks aren’t billionaires, or even millionaires. They live in the towns where they are, often, the *only* carrier to provide reliable and affordable coverage. They are usually geeks and they do this because they’re passionate about wireless and they care about their colleagues and their communities. They don’t have hundreds of millions stashed away to “bridge” this gap until Congress gets its act together.

c.) I don’t know if you’d call these “foreshocks,” but there are plenty of signs of the stress this limbo is increasingly placing on the industry as a whole, even beyond the potential impact for the several regional wireless carriers that have already shutdown over the past year or so. Wireless, *particularly* at the regional scale, is an ecosystem. And a delicate one at that. And while rip-and-replace may not have been the precise proximate cause, I think there is a compelling argument that this situation certainly hasn’t *helped* folks like Airspan, CommScope, and others.

(The painful irony of us *hurting* our domestic 5G+ expertise, engineering, and R+D capacity, let alone our underlying networks, coverage, and connectivity, by bungling all of this — if we don’t adjust course rapidly — is not lost on me.)

While *we* won’t be directly impacted by any reimbursement funding from the program itself, we are at least indirectly impacted by the damage that will be inflicted on the wireless industry as a whole, and I don’t think that damage will be isolated nor manageable for many small carriers if Congress ultimately, effectively, defaults on their obligations here.

I have no idea why Congress has apparently chosen to play this bizarre game of “chicken” with a bunch of small, mostly mom-and-pop telephone companies. They’ve pretty much all been around since the cellular days, generally “do their thing” because they care, stay out of politics, and wouldn’t hurt a fly (but they do work to try to make sure *you* have coverage to call 9-1-1 should *you* accidentally hurt a fly).

I can’t make sense of most of it, but I do know that we all will lose here if someone in Washington doesn’t start to try to figure out a path forward (out of this mess that they created).

[justen burdette @justen]

The unnecessary uncertainty and chaos Congress is creating by mandating (and promising to fund) this work and then completely refusing to follow-through has real consequences far beyond Washington.

I get that “compromise” and seemingly accomplishing almost anything can be viewed cynically as bad things by partisan strategists, especially in an election year. But there’s no compromise needed here, everybody agreed then and agrees now that this was and is a critical priority.

We can all even pretend nothing has been “accomplished” if that helps somehow — just the minimal administrative follow-through required to make sure the federal government doesn’t bankrupt the remaining small wireless carriers in this country by forcing them to buy new equipment, promising to fund that work, and then refusing to actually back up the small “full faith and credit” detail. No big deal.

But, seriously, the impact this all has on small carriers and the folks that depend on them for coverage is inexcusable.

And I fear we are inching closer to a lot of this self-inflicted damage becoming irreversible.

I know “call your Senator, call your Representative” might be cliché, but for plenty of Americans that depend on regional or rural carriers for coverage, they soon might not even be able to do that if Congress doesn’t keep its word.

So, please. Call your Senator. Call your Representative. Whether you are a customer of a regional carrier or not, the fallout from this will reverberate across our industry (and beyond) if Congress doesn’t act to fix this.

https://t.co/DAQxHIg5bk

[justen burdette @justen]

Also great convo between @justinMreilly from @GetWavelo and Rob Bennett from @dishwireless. A lot of excitement on the BSS front, and I’ve never been able to say that in my life before now. It matters a lot — anything innovative in our sector tends to wither waiting for BSS.

[justen burdette @justen]

Of course, @TelcoDR + @totogi coding a custom BSS using their new platform on stage at @GSMA @MWCHub ‘24... I know AI is all the rage right now, but Danielle has a lot of credibility for putting her money where her mouth is, not chasing buzzwords (hey, telco public cloud).

[justen burdette @justen]

(Yes, I know it was a stage demo, although so was the iPhone at MacWorld back in 2007 🤓. But we’ve had a chance to play around with it in a live environment… I think this is going to be a pretty incredible leap forward — for the folks that are willing to take the leap.)

[Tim Cook @tim_cook]

Seeing people’s reactions to trying Apple Vision Pro for the first time today was wonderful. Some people had tears in their eyes! Our mission is to enrich people’s lives, and I could feel that happening in real time. What a day!

[justen burdette @justen]

@heyjarad @reckless I remember that! But wasn’t the $9.95 only for iPod touch? I vaguely recall that maybe iPhone got it for free (but could definitely be misremembering).

[justen burdette @justen]

“There is so much technology in this thing that feels like magic when it works and frustrates you completely when it doesn't.” —@reckless

I think that pushing the envelope in that way has been a part of their DNA from their beginning: “Real artists ship.”

I remember reading, and sometimes feeling, the same with the original Watch, iPad, iPhone, iPod. Hell, with macOS (especially early OS X and Classic before it was called that). But you knew every one of them was going to be successful (and they obviously have been, wildly so).

Apple has long shipped products that “feel like magic” and that need to and do get better over time — not least epitomized by macOS eventually shifting to free software updates (and iOS barely even had the construct of paid software upgrades)…