Telecom on Diogo Gomes

Thesis defense

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 01:04:08 +0000

Today was a very important day, as I finally defended my Phd Thesis under the title “Resource Optimizations in Broadcast enabled Networks”.

I was probably a bit nervous as the defense was about the start, as shown in the above picture. The defense started with a 30 min delay, as one my jury member was held in traffic. But in 2h30m time I would be out of the room with boosting confidence levels, as I had finally successfully completed one my most important milestones.

Today I concluded a path, which started 5 years ago when I accepted the challenge of my supervisor to conduct research in an area that was then not very clear if it would become the next hit or flop in Telecom. Today we have very successful IPTV services and operators that cover several technologies (which include broadcast) under a single service platform.

I don’t think my research work in the area is done, far from that, I still believe much needs to be done and changed in the Telecom industry in order to survive in this century without becoming a fossil. But I leave all my new ideas to projects to come :)

Where is the symbian store?

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:44:22 +0100

So I’ve had a Nokia E51 for less then a week, and all I can say is:

“Where is the symbian store ?” Compared to the Apple Store where I can get tons of applications for my iPod Touch, or the recently announced store announced by google for TMobile’s G1 Phone announced today, the symbian platform definitely lacks a centralized gathering point for all the software available out there.

For a newcomer such as myself, the task of find applications that fit our needs is too high when compared with the competition, and I don’t think of my self as a tech savvy person…

New (old) Cellphone

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:40:22 +0100

After less then a year of usage my SE w580 has failed me… the cursor right key doesn’t work which makes it pretty hard to navigate in the main screen and to write sms with symbols and using T9.

Luckly enough my father had a Nokia E51 hanging around the house since he bought an iPhone, which I’ll be using for the next time being

That to say until one of the following things happen: I buy my self an iPhone, I get my w580 fixed, the Nokia too fails. Now what can I say about the Nokia E51 ?

C-Mobile Project

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:11:19 +0100

As you might have noticed, I’ve been really busy in the last few months as C-Mobile project reached it’s end, and some demos had to be delivered :)

I can say that my team did a good job and to show their good work we have created a video for YouTube.

You can find more detailed videos here

Telecom API's

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:17:43 +0100

The Telecom Operators that relied in voice services are dead. And today’s operators fight for their own existence in a world dominated by the Web 2.0 where services can be created, combined in matter of day’s if not hours by limited resources teams. This new playground poses several challenges to telecom forums that have in the last years devised several API’s for enabling developers to plug in to their network. The following table has the particularity of synthesizing what’s going on.

Real cost of content

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:04:28 +0000

In the last decade, tech evangelist praised the value of “Content” as the real value in todays and future technological society.

The truth couldn’t be any further from those predictions.

The value of music has dropped to such levels that caused an unprecedented crisis in the Industry. Today any musician can afford to produce it’s own album and distribute it over the internet thanks to it’s personal computer equiped with pro-consumer hardware/software. The Artic Monkeys were one of such cases. The music industry realized this paradigm too late, and is now facing the consequences (decreased revenues, and artists breaking their contracts and going independent).

New cellphone

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:00:00 +0000

After more then a month carefully choosing my new cellphone, I choose none of the candidates.

Instead I went with the Sony Ericsson w580i, which actually belongs to the same family as the S500i but has walkman capabilities, and most importantly doesn’t have a fame of cracking the keyboard after less then a week use.

Technically speaking the W580i is an EDGE cellphone that fits my previously mentioned requirements: slide form factor, bluetooth, high-speed modem and costed less then 300€. From the pack of candidate cellphones the grey version of the W580i is also IMHO the most beautiful of them all. So all said I think I did a good buy, but only time will tell as I had only the weekend to test it.

choosing a new cellphone

Sun, 30 Sep 2007 00:00:00 +0100

I’m in the market for a new cellphone.

My requirements are for:

Clam or Slider form-factor
Bluetooth
Highspeed modem (>EDGE)
around 300€ (less would be good :))

So far my choice is between these two:

The Motorola v3xx @ vodafone

Plus: HSDPA modem, always loved the design of the RAZR Minus: Old model, locked phone

The Sony Ericsson S500i

Plus: It’s similar to my S700i, fits the requirements
Minus: Most reviews complain about the bad materials

Workshop sobre Televisão Movel

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 12:25:46 +0100

Realiza-se no próximo dia 9 de Julho em Aveiro o workshop “Televisão Móvel: Tecnologia e Informação do Futuro”. Sem dúvida a não perder. Mais informação

Got an iPhone

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 12:16:59 +0100

Well, thats not true… But hey! Grabbed your attention didn’t I ?

Today is the US launch of the iPhone, for the Europeans this means at least half a year waiting…

According to the news, Vodafone will be the chosen carrier (good news, means I will not need to change carrier).

Meanwhile, I'm keeping my old 3.5G ipod and SE S700i, with a new theme just to get use to it :)

Life without google

Tue, 06 Feb 2007 18:46:56 +0000

What to do ?

dgomes@#######:~$ traceroute www.google.com
traceroute: Warning: www.google.com has multiple addresses; using 66.249.93.99
traceroute to www.l.google.com (66.249.93.99), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1 gtav.it.pt (193.136.93.1) 1.158 ms 1.074 ms 1.458 ms
 2 fw1.core.ua.pt (193.136.86.222) 0.988 ms 1.690 ms 2.290 ms
 3 cic-b06-sw01-12g.core.ua.pt (193.137.173.254) 7.445 ms 5.479 ms 6.572 ms
 4 Router2.Porto.fccn.pt (193.136.1.193) 3.262 ms 3.237 ms 2.133 ms
 5 Router3.10GE.Lisboa.fccn.pt (193.136.1.221) 7.222 ms 6.882 ms 10.265 ms
 6 ROUTER1.GE.Lisboa.fccn.pt (193.137.0.30) 13.651 ms 19.864 ms 17.119 ms
 7 fccn.rt1.lis.pt.geant2.net (62.40.124.185) 11.072 ms 10.535 ms 10.470 ms
 8 so-2-1-0.rt1.lon.uk.geant2.net (62.40.112.146) 41.985 ms 129.115 ms 35.385 ms
 9 ldn-b2-pos4-0.telia.net (213.248.75.109) 32.387 ms 33.714 ms 38.874 ms
10 * * *
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iPhone viral ad in IETF ?!

Fri, 26 Jan 2007 13:43:52 +0000

My friend Alfredo was reading a recent IETF draft on Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) when suddenly we noticed an interesting phrase out of the blue:

in line 820: “Going to buy an iPhone?”

But it was not all, afterwards I run a search in the document and found in the definition of “End-System”:

in line 325: “An iPhone”

Well this is interesting, specially because the draft is from CISCO. Start you conspiracy theories!

Getting a home telephone

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 23:38:34 +0000

After a long (and expensive) phone call with my father, we both realized that it made little sense in our days to use a GSM network while at home.

That said we figured out that voipbuster was the best service in town: free calls, SIP based service and some of our contacts are already in this network. We could have gone with skype, but it offers a closed shop service with no inter operation besides legacy networks (PSTN, GSM).