Spout.it

|Making your own phone company

About 4 years ago I found myself with
copious ammounts of free time and it was
going to be this way for about a year
while I limited my movements, spending
and my interaction with others in an
effort to put many of my habits back
into balance.

I decided to challenge myself by buying
and old Nokia phone for myself and some
friends and we would have a good ol'
fashioned txt group, just like we did
in the days of QWERTY phones.

Without any research, I bought 10 Nokia
Asha 210s and waited. When they arrive
(all in box) I charged them and got
started. That's when I found out two
completely limiting factors.

These phones were '2g' and were no
longer supported by carriers. "Huh,
these aren't THAT old", I thought.
I performed updates via wifi with the
last known update I could find.
The update, produced my MS, broke
many of the remaining features, locked
application install and general made
my phones unusable. This was outrageous!
This was the first time I was directly
affected by manufactured obsolecence.

Over the next 3 months I figured out how
to downgrade the onboard J2ME, got
customized certificates installed, bought
hardware to flash the calling instructions
to use Wifi and use VoIP instead of a
carrier. In addition I forked my own version
of Bombus XMPP and got MIDPSSH working.
After it was all done I now had phones
that would call, send messages (albiet
only on wifi) they were moreless functional
again.

This caused me to face the fact that they
needed some sort of calling service so
they could still be considered phones.
I got extremely in the weeds with Asterisk,
Trunks, Conferences, Voicemail. Not being
able to use these over cellular really
REALLY bothered me so I decided to
learn a bit about the cellular business.

Enter COVID. Everything shut down and lots
of companies were scrambling to secure new
business and hold onto established customers.
I started calling carriers to understand
how these VMNO Virtual Mobile Network Operator
companies work.

A Virtual Operator is a reseller of a larger
carrier's service and I noticed two that
claim to offer 2g service while being VMNOs
for ATT, a company who phased out 2g.
I made call after call with marketing reps
until perhaps by mistake I was sent to an
engineering manager for a company called
Red Pocket.

We started having a semi weekly call and
we would chat about the business and I
would tell him about what I was able to
do with my long bricked phones. From here
I learned about the world of Mobile Virtual
Network Enablers. These were firms that
carry network contracts across carriers
and help craft custom SIM leases depending
on specific hardware needs (2g in my case
and Carrier calling via VoIP)

---------------

07MAY24

These MVNEs are typically the groups that
own or 'power' most of the companies that
provide IOT subscriptions for companies
alot of individuals stay away from plans
such as Helium, Hologram and Soracom
because they seem cost prohibitive. When
looking at an IOT provider you need to know
if they give access to an Account Management
CONSOLE.

The AMC is not a control panel for your
account. And AMC is a console for redeeming
bandwidth credits. Soracom for instances
allows you to take data purchased with
other MVNES and essentially add them as
'access tokens' to your accounts.

The terms of these tokens are all pre
agreed by the MVNE you work with and 90%
of the time it is going to be a 'Bulk Contract
Sell'. These are usually byproducts of MVNOS
who are not making their sales obligations
with their parent carriers and instead of
pay a penalty they will essentially transfer
the unused SIM IDs into an MVNE token, selling
the network access off.

This is where YOU come in. You can purchase
these tokens, giving you packaged access to
certain carriers on certain bands with up to
certain datacaps and bandwidths. This is where
planning your needs and usecase is critical.
I mostly operate landline voip phones or
feature specific dumbphones.

My customers only need enough data to make calls.

Another aspect that helps you make judgement
calls when buying expiring data is knowing
how fast you theoretically are going to use it.
Understanding codecs, bitrates and your
carrier (in my case Soracom) cost on sim activity
is really important. Some Soracom packages have
the option of taking their 'live' time in the
form of data vs a monetary cost (This has serious
fine print).