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Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges
- IIAOPSW 7y agoInstead of mobile phones, they should just switch over to IP via Avian Carrier.
- MrOxiMoron 7y agoThat's a problem when your research subject eats the carriers for breakfast ;-)
- steve19 7y agoEagle IP simply encapsulates Pigeon IP like TCP over a VPN.
- jemurray 7y agoegl0
- ummwhat 7y agoLiterally taken from the wiki page on IPoAC https://i.imgur.com/DUH5Kre.png https://i.imgur.com/DUH5Kre.png
- andreareina 7y agoNot 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 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2549
- rzzzt 7y agoeth0: <NO-CARRIER, BROADCAST, MULTICAST, UP>
- buboard 7y agoI d never guess they were so cosmopolitan
- orthoxerox 7y agoEven people researching them for a living made a mistake this time.
- pvaldes 7y agoA 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
- 0b0001 7y agoI'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.
- Symbiote 7y agoAs it says in the article, they are now on a different tariff. There are special tariffs for this type of usage.
- vorpalhex 7y agoReally should of planned for.. over-the-air updates.
- pvaldes 7y agoEagles 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.
- 7952 7y agoI 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.
- concerned_user 7y agoIt says data roaming not calls. There are specialized tariffs for trackers no idea why they didn't use one.
- novaRom 7y agoLooking at the map, I wonder how light pollution affects their migration routes.
- meristem 7y agoEagles are a diurnal migratory species.
- maxden 7y agoReminds 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/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/03/stork_mobile_theft/
- mytailorisrich 7y agoCome on operators, waive the bill for science!
- probst 7y agoThey did. It says so in the last paragraph of the article: > Megafon's offer to bail out the team, reported by RIA Novosti news, means they can continue monitoring the eagles' routes, collecting vital data to help their survival.
- lostlogin 7y agoIt seems a prime advertising opportunity. Let the story get out and the crowd funding get underway. Then waive the charge or give a sum of money to the researchers.
- secfirstmd 7y agoIn 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.
- eloff 7y agoThat's such a South African story. People will steal anything there (kind of understandable when there's so much poverty.)
- microcolonel 7y agoThey are so poor because the society has no standards, and the state is organized around cultural jingoism rather than pragmatism. They are poor because people will steal anything.
- jmrko 7y agoVery interesting comment, not because I agree with it, but I think it exposes a classic left vs right wing problem, and that the attitude is applied universally instead of selectively. IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group.
- DuskStar 7y ago> IMO, the optimal attitude for society would be if everyone was "left-wing" (generous, forgiving,...) toward others/out-groups and "right-wing" (demanding, requesting responsibility,...) toward yourself/in-group. That's rather odd, because if anything I'd say the opposite is best - you can trust your ingroup to have similar values to you, and thus can afford to forgive them/be generous without being taken advantage of. On the other hand, outgroups WON'T share your values, and being more generous to them than to the ingroup is just self destructive. And I would have thought both of those were common sense, too.
- DoubleGlazing 7y agoThis 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.
- jeremyjh 7y agoWhat 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.
- DoubleGlazing 7y agoThere 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.
- im3w1l 7y agoWouldn't be surprised if matchbox size is too big already.
- sargram01 7y agoRoaming 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.
- veddox 7y agoWell, the EU banned them several years back. One might consider that one of its biggest legislative triumphs :D
- wolfi1 7y agojust inside the EU, if you are going anywhere outside it's going to be expensive again
- gmueckl 7y agoI 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.
- srg0 7y agoMy 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.
- sargram01 7y agoIt 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. :)
- netsharc 7y agoAnd 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...
- acroabs 7y agoHo ho ho
- acroabs 7y agoho ho ho
- notatoad 7y agoIt'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-the-spanish-portuguese-border https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/why-do-vultures-care-about...
- mvexel 7y agoHere's the interactive map: https://gps.aquila-it.pl/en/migration-maps/steppe-eagle-russia-kazakhstan https://gps.aquila-it.pl/en/migration-maps/steppe-eagle-russ...
- qwerty456127 7y agoIsn'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.
- Stevvo 7y agoIt 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.
- hkai 7y agoSo SMS should be free and mobile companies should just charge more for data, to earn the same profit?
- cnst 7y agoIt'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 https://www.c-span.org/person/?srinivasankeshav.
- mikece 7y agoI 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.
- netsharc 7y agoThe BBC article (see dupe link below / https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50180781 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.
- technofiend 7y agoMissed opportunity for Google Fi to offer up some data-only SIMs to emphasize their service and pricing.