However you have to understand how a lot of the cellular operators function. They don't build much of the systems in house, but buy from large companies like Ericsson, Huawei and so forth. Therefore all their functionality is controlled by those companies.
That being said, the cellular operators don't like to hand out contact information about their customers. All billing is normally done via a MSISDN to a single system that stores a customers credit, and records all billing information. It does not contain any customer details.
I have actually seen a different approach, wherein any messages going to a MSISDN that has been identified as a tablet or modem / dongle, will be redirected to another MSISDN as a SMS or an email address, depending on the customers preferences. All these details were stored in another database.
The system is used to help reduce bandwidth, as well as including a better TCP algorithm for use over the radio links, to help cut down lag and retransmissions, because the radio links are notoriously bad, and the standard algorithm doesn't quite cut it.
The system will actively try to down sample both images and video to help reduce bandwidth usage. In the case of video, it also tries to limit the buffered video to no more than X seconds ahead.
And finally, it is also big cache, and it tries to keep the most requested content locally. One of the new features is the ability to 'guess' what video is being viewed inside a HTTPS stream and try to cache it too.
As mentioned above with regards to the Canada telcos inserting iframes or content regarding their data usage and caps, the system can inject any content into the HTML page if it is provided over HTTP. They do this because normally they have no way to contact customers that have tablets, or 3G modems / dongles, to alert them of limits or just to be able to contact them.
The system in question is developed by a company called Byte Mobile, which was bought by Citrix.
Normally all port 80, and 8080 traffic are redirected to the system, and then rules are run to determine what happens to the traffic, and or code to be injected into the page.
I was one of the people that decided to fund the project on kickstarter. It might have taken a while, but they have finally delivered, and the build quality is right there with Apple devices.
This is mostly for the people that commented in the wired post that the project looked like vapoware, but they have done an amazing job in building the product.
Been waiting all week for this to come out. I love doing wargames, and have been looking forward to trying out stockfighter for a long time now after reading through all your posts.
So I actually backed this product, and the guys from Bragi are very good about posting updates. I believe they have a deadline of posting an update on the 1st of each month. They always post their progress and include videos with each update showing new features or completion of the current stage.
It also seems that most of the comments are saying its all vapoware. According to the last update, the developer devices are expected to ship next week and the week after. I will gladly post an update when I receive mine.
This is a simple implementation of Variant Symlinks similar to the ones found on FreeBSD. It uses an environment variable, in this case PQ_CURRENT_CHASSIS, to resolve the symlink.
This allows for a single global symlink, that will resolve differently depending on the value of the environment variable set when the process starts.
At the moment the environment variable has been hard coded, as its for another project, but I do intend to update the code later to support custom environment variables in the symlink.
I would be glad to receive any feed back, anything at all. Thanks :)
It really made me chuckle and is just a great new take on the stock standard comments.