Re: Problems provisioning APN from SIMs

[Alex J Lennon <ajlennon@dynamicdevices.co.uk>]

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On 04/06/2015 23:59, Alex J Lennon wrote:
>
> On 04/06/2015 23:03, Denis Kenzior wrote:
>> Hi Alex,
>>
>>>> Ordering should have nothing to do with it.
>>>>
>>> Yes, the ordering is relevant. We (like other ofono users I suspect)
>>> have to allow multiple APNs or the automatic provisioning process fails.
>>>
>>> Then, the first context found in serviceproviders.xml is what is used by
>>> default for the connection.
>>>
>>> An example of the problem is that if you use a major telco's SIM card in
>>> the UK - Vodafone, ofono will then default to using an ASDA mobile
>>> context because of the ordering, and this will fail.
>>>
>>> My feeling is that a larger provider like Vodafone or O2 should be the
>>> default, not ASDA mobile or GiffGaff, and this should thus come first
>>> (understanding that the Ofono project does not control this document)
>> It has been years since I wrote the provisioning plugin, but the
>> intent was to fail if looking up MCC/MNC combo resulted in multiple
>> matches. So this may be a bug, or you might be using some custom
>> behavior.  But in the end, ordering of the entries should not affect
>> the provisioning logic.
>>
>>> Allowing Duplicates - Not by default no, but you have a boolean
>>> parameter in there and logic to allow for duplicate contexts, which we
>>> have to enable (as do others I think from my Googling on this) or the
>>> provisioning support is unusable with the upstream serviceproviders.xml
>>> as far as I can see.
>> Then that's the problem.  The intent was never to allow duplicates.
>> That boolean was added for tools/lookup-apn only.
>>
>>> I'm not entirely sure how the RilModem fork relates to Ofono but you can
>>> see they had the same problem
>>>
>>> /*
>>>
>>>     * TODO: review with upstream. Default behavior was to
>>>
>>>     * disallow duplicate APN entries, which unfortunately exist
>>>
>>>     * in the mobile-broadband-provider-info db.
>>>
>>>     */
>>>
>>>
>>> ref:
>>> https://github.com/rilmodem/ofono/blob/master/plugins/provision.c#L55
>>>
>>> SPN - Thanks. This seems promising. I will investigate the SPN values
>>> further.
>> The real fix is to fix mobile-broadband-provider-info.
> Yes I would agree with that.
>
> As I come to investigate this, I find I am concerned about using the
> Service Provider Name as I can't see any registry for those names, it's
> free text for display purposes, so I assume it is at least possible it
> might change without warning,
> whereas there does seem to be a registry for MCC/MNC (e.g.
> http://www.mcc-mnc.com/)
>
> I am thinking it may be preferable to use the registered IIN number from
> the ICCID - http://www.controlf.net/iccid/
>
> This seems a more controlled way of providing the uniqueness needed to
> me and presumably it's easy enough to read the ICCID out, if it's not
> already being read out.

No that's not going to work. I see ICCID prefix is the same for e.g. O2
and Tesco Mobile, being MCC and MNC

UK

	

O2

	

894411

	

23410

	

UK

	

Tesco Mobile
<http://autopuk.grg.com/>(MVNO <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MVNO> of O2)

	

894411

	

23410


Regards,

Alex


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