WCA September 2007

Telecom news

users when they are in range of a Boingo hot spot. Eric Sylvers of the New York Times noted that, while other companies have monthly plans, most of these apply extra fees for minutes exceeding a set limit. Mr Sylvers wrote: “Because many services charge in half-hour or hour segments, people who connect for 10 or 15 minutes often pay for Internet access time they do not use, according to a report [in May] from Trustive, an aggregator of about 25,000 hot spots worldwide.” Boingo believes that its plan will tap an entirely new market segment: the international traveller who passes quickly through many major cities. If so, it can expect plenty of competition. “We will be rolling out flat-rate pricing in the next few months,” Mr Sylvers was told by Owen Geddes, director of business development at The Cloud. The British-based Wi-Fi network operator provides access by way of 7,000 hot spots in Britain and 1,500 more in Germany, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. “Wi-Fi across Europe for the consumer market is just too expensive now,” Mr Geddes said in June, implicitly acknowledging the possibility of a price war ahead. “So we will be repositioning ourselves by lowering prices in the coming months.” According to the results a recent survey conducted by RSA, the security division of a US computer software maker, the number of Wi-Fi hot spots accessible to the public rose last year in Paris (37%), London (27%), and New York (17%). The annual study traces the same route every time to produce an accurate indication of growth trends. Elsewhere in telecom . . . Japan’s largest mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo reported that it has begun testing a new cellular network nearly 100 times faster than its current system. The company said in a 16 th July press release that it expects the equipment being tested to yield download speeds of up to 300Mbps. Current maximum download speeds are 3.6Mbps. The new network is scheduled for completion by 2009. As noted by NewsEdge (16 th July), competition in Japan’s saturated mobile communications market has been driving down margins for voice services. DoCoMo and rival carriers are trying to capture more business by turning to services which require more bandwidth. ✆ ✆

A spying operation at the level of state highlights the danger in outmoded telecom systems

A sophisticated spying operation that tapped into the mobile phones of the prime minister of Greece and other officials of his government discloses weaknesses in telecommunications systems using decades-old computer code. The secret operation was blown early in 2005 when the hackers tried to update their software and generated an alert – whereupon it was discovered that they had installed no fewer than 6,500 lines of code. The investigation into the secret tapping of the calls of some 100 people is open. But Jeremy Kirk of IDG News Service, writing in PC World , drew on a report by two computer scientists to offer a look at how the hack was accomplished. (A fuller analysis of what Mr Kirk called ‘an operation of breathtaking depth and success’ is available on IEEE Spectrum Online, the website of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc [IEEE]). The case includes the ‘first known rootkit that has been installed in [a phone] exchange,’ said Diomidis Spinellis, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, who authored the report with Vassilis Prevelakis, an assistant professor of computer science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Mr Kirk defined a rootkit as a special program that buries itself deep into an operating system for some malicious activity and is extremely difficult to detect. He explained the method employed in Greece: “The rootkit enabled a transaction log to be disabled and allow call monitoring on four switches made by Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson within Vodafone’s equipment. The software enabled the hackers to monitor phone calls in the same way law enforcement would, minus the required court order. The software allowed for a second, parallel voice stream to be sent to another phone for monitoring.” (‘Greek Spying Case Uncovers First Phone Switch Rootkit,’ 12 th July). The intruders covered their tracks by installing patches on the system to route around logging mechanisms that would alert administrators that calls were being monitored. An irony of the case is that the clever unknown hackers were tripped up by their own self-improvement effort. The question suggests itself: could a similarly ambitious provider ✆

have protected its distinguished Greek subscribers? The authors of ‘The Athens Affair,’ cited above, believe the scheme might have been uncovered sooner through statistical call analysis linking the calls of those being monitored to calls to phones used to monitor the conversations. Mr Kirk of IDG News noted that carriers already do that sort of analysis, if more for purposes of marketing than security. It appears that, in the main, vulnerability to rogue code, viruses, and rootkits is the unfortunate result of the complicated and somewhat haphazard development of telecom infrastructure. In the words of the report: “Complex interactions between subsystems and baroque coding styles – some of them remnants of programs written 20 or 30 years ago – confound developers and auditors alike.” But not rogue interlopers. The IEEE website gives ‘The Athens Affair’ this subhead: “How some extremely smart hackers pulled off the most audacious cell-network break-in ever”. The proliferation of Wi-Fi hot spots – wireless Internet connections in busy public places – is creating an opening for companies that bring together the Wi-Fi networks of different operators whose clients may then open a laptop and connect, at the same price, wherever in the world they happen to find themselves. On 25 th June, the ‘aggregator’ Boingo Wireless Inc (Santa Monica, California) introduced what it said is the first global flat-rate plan for Wi-Fi hot spots. For a monthly fee of $39, or €29, subscribers are entitled to use the hot spots of any of the company’s affiliates for as long as they wish. Access to more than 100,000 hot spots will include 27,000 in North America; 23,000 in Asia; and 51,000 in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These are owned and operated by EarthLink, BT, Verizon, Sprint Nextel, and Telecom Italia, among others. The company said no special software is needed, although it does recommend that clients download GoBoingo, a program that alerts ‘Aggregation’ promises a way to cut the cost of Wi-Fi usage

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Wire & Cable ASIA – September/October 2007