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The Miserable State of Modems and Mobile Network Operators

This is a story of the complexities of cellular connectivity, the perils of closed ecosystems, and how to debug what you cannot see.

They invest heavily in the Zephyr RTOS ecosystem, open source the vast majority of their SDK, provide better developer tooling than their competitors, and are generally fairly responsive on their public forums. Prior to my divergence into the morass of intellectual property that provides the foundation of wireless communication, we had just observed that DNS requests were successful when issued via the Zephyr network shell. The root of the problem is that, even though we have performed a thorough investigation, tested extensively, and communicated with vendors about the issue, we are still guessing because the modem firmware is closed source and the mobile network operator (MNO) infrastructure is opaque.

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