Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges | Hacker News Reader

Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges

bbc.co.uk

192 pointsbauc62 comments

Reminds me of a Polish group doing a Stork study which racked up £2,010 in charges when someone found the sim and used it to make voice calls.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/stork_mobile_theft/

Isn't it ridiculous how much can it cost to send an SMS over a cellular network? I would understand if they were sending a video message from Mars but it's a really small ASCII text message sent to a neighbor country in the 21-st century. The whole global telephone system needs to be re-designed.

It's not just that — SMS actually get delivered as part of the unused signalling capacity as far as the airwaves are concerned, hence the 160 7bit limitation, to fit into the existing protocols.

E.g., as far as the the costs go, I'd argue that airwaves would be most expensive in something like SMS, as it's a limited and finite resource that has to be shared by everyone within a given geographic area, yet they're basically used for free here due to the signalling already being mandatory even without SMS, so, any charge for SMS is basically pure profit by selling a resource that has to exists just for the signalling alone.

If someone knows more about how is managed between ME and the tower, please correct me if I'm wrong. There's also the cost to run SMSC (Short Message service center), but that part would be done in the cloud, and cloud is a pretty commodity resource nowadays, where these sorts of costs per message can hardly be justified, so, basically, it'll probably be the billing itself that contributes most of the cost to the cost of SMS.

P.S. Fun fact: I took a course at UWaterloo (in Canada) about the maths behind the computer networks, and during the time of the course, my professor has testified as a witness for US Government about the rising costs of SMS — https://www.c-span.org/person/?srinivasankeshav.

Why should the company sell SMS in relation to its cost? The seat selection on a plane costs literally zero for the company but people pay like 50 USD to seat at the front.

A phone company just needs to find creative ways to earn profit. Why is it evil?

It is evil when it's unreasonably expensive. The fact just a small number of people would use it in their sane mind even though there is capacity to serve much more people at no additional expense for the provider (nor for the environment) suggests there is no reason to keep prices this high.

It shouldn't cost anything at all. SMS piggybacks onto the signalling paths of GSM, which had 128 bytes unused, that can fit 160 characters. Your phone is sending & receiving those signals anyway, regardless of if you are sending an SMS message.

So SMS should be free and mobile companies should just charge more for data, to earn the same profit?

Instead of mobile phones, they should just switch over to IP via Avian Carrier.

That's a problem when your research subject eats the carriers for breakfast ;-)

Literally taken from the wiki page on IPoAC

https://i.imgur.com/DUH5Kre.png

Not just the wiki page, it's straight from the rfc[1]:

> Unintentional encapsulation in hawks has been known to occur, with decapsulation being messy and the packets mangled.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549

Eagle IP simply encapsulates Pigeon IP like TCP over a VPN.

egl0

eth0: <NO-CARRIER, BROADCAST, MULTICAST, UP>

It's too bad the eagles aren't as good at obeying national borders as spanish vultures are...

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/why-do-vultures-care-about...

Roaming prices are the equivalent of scamming tourists, I don’t think there’s any body that can prevent it internally unfortunately, it’s just somehow acceptable for companies to shake down travelers for stupid amounts of money.

Well, the EU banned them several years back. One might consider that one of its biggest legislative triumphs :D

And sadly it was phone companies pretending it was their benevolence, saying "Now on our network you can roam in the EU with the same tariff as back home!".

I've read a new clause in an ad that lists the UK as one of these countries, with an asterisk that said only until the date of Brexit (obviously..).

I wonder how much of this was due to ministers being annoyed at having to change SIM cards whenever they landed in Brussels...

Doubt it had anything to do with ministers. They probably have 'work' phones, and these are paid by 'work'. In other words, citizen's tax euros ...

just inside the EU, if you are going anywhere outside it's going to be expensive again

My operator made roaming outside the EU very expensive (EUR 35 for 1 week, with a limited amount of calls and messages, and 150 MB of data traffic, yes, megabytes). But being able to use phone normally anywhere in the EU, even if only with 3G, is great. Just have to remember to disable 4G.

I switched to a new plan after that rule came into effect and my new plan happens to be a lot worse outside the EU. I am not sure if this is a coincidence.

It would be interesting to see which countries voted for and against the ban. If Italy was against the ban for example, to stop ripping off travelers, that would be amusing. :)

This is where the ham radio APRS protocol would come in handy.

It was designed for position reporting. If course not everywhere would have an APRS receiver, but I'm sure the tracker could cache data until it finds a receiving station.

What are the power requirements for something like that? Since the stations are much less densely distributed than cell towers I'd expect you'd have to use a lot more energy transmitting if you'd hope to get any data. This needs to be light enough to attach to an eagle.

There are APRS transmitters built for balloons that are not much bigger than a matchbox. It's all line-of-sight at the VHF frequencies and you can get quite a good distance on a surprisingly low amount of power. 50 miles on 200mW what's is doable, longer range on less power is not uncommon if the conditionss are in your favour.

Wouldn't be surprised if matchbox size is too big already.

I wonder if a virtual country code could be made for scientific inquests like this which are immune from termination and transit fees in use cases like this. Would be good for science.

The BBC article (see dupe link below / https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50180781 ) says their provider agreed to "bail them out"... I think the easiest thing for the scientists would be/have been to talk to whoever is providing the infrastructure.

In South Africa the traffic lights had some cards in them at one point and the same things happened. Traffic lights smashed so the cards could be used.

Here's the interactive map: https://gps.aquila-it.pl/en/migration-maps/steppe-eagle-russ...

Missed opportunity for Google Fi to offer up some data-only SIMs to emphasize their service and pricing.

I d never guess they were so cosmopolitan

Even people researching them for a living made a mistake this time.

Looking at the map, I wonder how light pollution affects their migration routes.

Eagles are a diurnal migratory species.

A solution could be to design the system to make calls directly to a list of ornitologists or ornitologist societies in the other countries, that shouldn't be really complicated to arrange and then ask them to return the data by standard e-mail. Is a small world.

Or store the eagles travel data in a cloud, that feels also poetically appropriate for this case

I'm sure it's somewhat hard to change the system once deployed. They could just get a cheap global tariff -- but the eagles won't swap SIM cards themselves.

As it says in the article, they are now on a different tariff.

There are special tariffs for this type of usage.

Really should of planned for.. over-the-air updates.

Eagles won't swap SIM cards but researchers will do.

This kind of systems are not designed to last forever; Harness belts in young animals are designed to break, fall and be recovered.

Or better yet an agreement with gsm operators were made ahead of the time so they did not charge the "eagle calls", and they were all made to a single cloud-or-whatever-distribution-center.

The problem here is data roaming charges. Those do not depend on the destination of the message. They are incurred when you send bytes to a cell tower operated by a carrier outside your plan.

I think roaming charges apply even when you are calling a number in the same county.

Really this is already a good solution, it just needs the right tariff.

As far as I know this kind of additional charge for dialing within the same country exists in some countries, but this should be not confused with "roaming charge" for intra-country roaming.

But if your SIM is away from the home network it is always roaming. The data will be sent back to the home country. So sending an SMS to a local number is like sending an SMS to a foreign number.

Yeah, except that somehow I found that it doesn't always work this way. I live in the UK, and when I call my mum in Poland using a British sim card, I have to pay extra for making a foreign call. But when she's over here, I can call her for free(using my domestic minutes allowance), even though I'm still dialing a +48 number, the telecom knows that the call is being routed internally and no extra charges are applied. Yes, I was surprised at that too.

It says data roaming not calls. There are specialized tariffs for trackers no idea why they didn't use one.

Is this something you'd need to arrange with each carrier? The article says they didn't expect them to fly to Iran.

You sure you know what options the local carries does provide?

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