Telecommunications
154 episodes
#6446: What Home Fiber Optic Cables Actually Do to Your Eyes
A typical home fiber terminal outputs under 4 milliwatts, far below the 166-milliwatt international safety limit for single-mode fiber.
#6445: Why That In-Wall Fiber Link Refuses to Turn On
On a ten-meter fiber run, a single mated connector pair can cause twenty times more signal loss than the entire length of glass.
#6394: Why API Email Still Relies on SMTP
Connection pooling cut Mailgun's delivery time from ninety seconds down to roughly six hundred milliseconds per message.
#6041: How CENO Moves a Web Page Into a Censored Country
A walk through CENO's actual plumbing: signed caches, volunteer bridges, and why the chain is deliberately short.
#5831: Managed vs Layer 3: Two Switch Axes, One Empty Box
Managed and Layer 3 aren't the same thing — they're orthogonal. One quadrant of the matrix is a product that basically doesn't exist.
#5766: SNMP: The 40-Year-Old Stopgap Running Your Rack
SNMP was designed as a temporary fix. Four decades later it's on every switch, UPS, and router you own. Here's how it actually works.
#5710: Tristan da Cunha: Life on the World's Most Remote Island
222 people, one village, and a dialect that conjugates like a single person — what life is actually like on the world's most remote inhabited island.
#5687: The Speech Scientist Behind Teletubbies
Andrew Davenport studied speech sciences and performance art — then built Teletubbies on developmental theory, not gibberish.
#5665: Fiber Through the Conduit: Bends, Dust, and Pull Socks
A failed Ethernet crimp caps a link at 100 megabit. Can the same conduit carry 10GBASE-SR fiber instead?
#5664: Rack Dreams: Getting Display and USB Across the Room
Display over fiber is the easy part. USB is where it gets annoying — and the single-UPS dream doesn't quite close.
#5607: BYO Modem, But Only If We Approve It
Bezeq lets you bring your own modem — if it's on the list and you hand over its serial number. Is that security, or provisioning in a costume?
#5563: Your Fiber Is Dark: What You Can Actually Test
Your ONT is dark and there's no sync light to watch. Here's what a PON power meter can actually tell you before you call the ISP.
#5534: When Your Carrier Sells You Coverage It Can't Deliver
Daniel's phone went from reliable to useless after a cheap SIM swap. Here's what's actually happening when a network claims coverage it can't deliver.
#5528: What Your eSIM Manager Is Actually Doing
Those log lines during eSIM setup aren't noise — they're the GSMA provisioning spec running in the open.
#5526: Can a Phone Bond Two Cellular Links?
Android can bond Wi-Fi and cellular — but two cellular data paths at once? That's where the hardware and the OS both say no.
#5484: When Governments Own the Pipes: Telecom's Open-Access Model
Could the state own all telecom infrastructure while private companies compete on top? New Zealand and Stockholm already tried it.
#5479: Why Number Porting Takes 30 Minutes
Routing a ported number takes milliseconds. So why does the SIM swap take hours? We trace the signalling behind "keep your number.
#5477: Who Owns the Antennas? Israel's MVNO Puzzle
Israel's virtual operators won't tell you whose towers they ride. Turns out your phone already knows — if you read the right signals.
#5386: Morse Code Between Two Phones: Does It Actually Work?
Two phones, no data, one room. Morse over sound and flashlight — what the research says about echoes, timing, and whether anyone will hear you.
#5378: SIP Speakers, Multicast, and the One-Way Page
How SIP one-way paging actually works — and why multicast turns 500 speakers into a single call.
#5376: Why a Zello Pager Wearable Doesn't Exist Yet
Pagers blink until acknowledged. Zello beeps until you tap. But nobody's shipped the wearable that bridges them.
#5281: Why Your Cheap Phone Plan Feels Broken
Same phone, same spot, same 5G bars — so why does a cheap carrier crawl? It's not the signal.
#5248: Why HF Radio Beats Fiber When Governments Pull the Plug
HF loss doesn't scale with distance — it scales with ionospheric hops. And that changes everything about embassy comms.
#5247: Why HF Radio Still Matters When Networks Fail
HF and shortwave are the same band — and it's the only comms path no host nation can switch off. Here's why it persists.