I got my mobile phone bill in the mail the other day and, again, I nearly got a heart attack.   It has been like this for over the last 10 years. Whatever I do, this bill is always way higher than expected.

I tried everything from switching operators to  spending hours figuring out the optimal subscription plan. I do not place calls from my mobile if I can avoid it, especially abroad. I avoid SMS when e-mail is possible. I do not even dare to use the data services, although I have a 3G phone.  Still no luck. The main issue is that I work in a small country, live in the country nearby and often go to a two other countries for shopping and leisure. I am roaming on other networks than my home one 75% of the time. While this may sound unusual, actually this is what the whole European Union construction is all about: abolish borders.

I decided last year to subcribe to Transatel, a MNVO (Mobile Network Virtual Operator). In short, they do not have a network on their own, but buy capacity from other operators. It looked attractive because they cover several countries. They give you a local phone number in each country you choose. This makes it cheaper for the people calling you.  I can receive calls on my Luxembourg number while in Belgium and no roaming charges will apply. Sort of. Because, actually, you only get a limited number of minutes each month for call transfers across countries. Once you have reached the threshold, you are billed for the call transfers. This is just roaming charges by another name. At the time of subscription, they promised my monthly bill would be 50% lower. It looks like my usage profile was not part of their statistical sample…

The European mobile market is very fragmented. Each country has 3 or 4 mobile operators. Even those self labelled paneuropean networks like Vodaphone or Orange are actually alliances of different national operators, loosely tied by a similar logo.  All the rest of their offerings is different: subscription plans, services, phone numbers and roaming charges.  As for roaming charges, I noticed on several occasions in the past that if your home network operator is a Vodaphone partner, it may sometimes be cheaper to select a non-Vodaphone network abroad.

Those alliances are another way to make the offers more opaque to better fool the customer. On the economics of the mobile market, there is this interesting post from Kurtis Linqvist (thanks to Patrik Fältström for the link) . Just like Kurtis, I agree that there is no such thing as free and open mobile markets  in Europe.  I, too, hope the European Commission will continue to regulate the market until such time that it will cost the same price to call a mobile in Stockholm from Madrid that it is to place call from Los Angeles to Washington.  At&T in the US has a subscription plan for unlimited voice calls throughout the US for USD99.99/month. Unfortunately, given the current market conditions, I do not see a similar paneuropean offer any time soon.

Luxembourg City has started the deployment of a mesh WIFI network named HOTCITY. It’s free, as in “free beer”. It’s rather fast, too. They are deploying access points on signposts, traffic lights, etc.

As always, good intentions are somewhat countered by real life conditions. You have the access, but where can you actually sit with your laptop ?  Certainly not on the sidewalks at the Luxembourg station plaza. They are overcrowded by commuters waiting for the bus. In the train station itself, perhaps ? This time the HOTCITY signal is disturbed by the P&T Wifi installed in the station itself, and this one  is not free.

Cybersquatting often is a real issue for the one whose domain name has been stolen. Sometimes, though, it can generate a good laugh.
Take a look at this site:  http://www.luxembourg-isoc.org/

This was the first domain name used by the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC. We abandoned it some time around 2002 or 2003, to use “isoc.lu” instead. We stopped paying for the domain name. I verified at the time that the domain name had indeed disappeared from the whois and was removed form the indexes of search engines.

Hence, I was surprised to find while Googling that the domain name was:

1. still existing
2. still registered to ISOC Luxembourg
3. even hosted a web page which is a copy of the original main page of the original site, circa November 2000.

This is funny and problematic at the same time. Funny because, at least for me, this old web page brang back memories of a very exciting period. Problematic because this is rewriting history in a sense.This page is eight years old, yet the unsuspecting web surfer would think this is the latest one to date.

This also proves that one cannot trust the whois to return accurate data. I swear I have not renewed this domain name for at least four years. Still the data returned by whois is the one I submitted in 2001 !. The only difference is that I have never worked with EstDomains.

EuroDNS, the Luxembourg registrar, used its well attended New Year party last Wednesday to invite the Minister of Telecoms, Jean-Louis Schiltz to talk about a law voted at the end of December 2007. According to the Finance and Budget Commission Report on Draft Law 5801, «Revenues generated from use of, or license to use, a Domain Name are exempted from Luxembourg corporate taxes up to 80% ».

This is of course excellent news for EuroDNS, but also for domain name investors, both in Luxembourg and worldwide. ICANN will probably launch a RFP for new TLDs next June in Paris. As such, someone took the opportunity to mention that Luxembourg would be an ideal place to launch a new gTLD. The proposed gTLD floating around seems so obvious it is surprising no-one though about it before. At this stage, I cannot expand any further until this proposal is formalized, but stay tuned for more news.

Found in an office of the Luxembourg Ministry of Finance:

For those who do not read French, it says: “The seat opening is 29 X 23 cm wide. If you miss the hole, please use the brush to clean. This brush is not a toothbrush”

I blogged last year about the willingness of the Luxembourg authorities to enhance the country’s connectivity. I appended a traceroute showing the how a packet moving between two sites geographically distant of less than a kilometer from each other would actually travel through most of Europe. Not only is there no improvement to date, it is actually getting worse. Here is today’s traceroute. It goes is the other direction than last year’s.

traceroute to www.isoc.lu (158.64.14.86), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
(5 internal hops deleted)

6 147.67.224.2 (147.67.224.2) 8.301 ms 9.866 ms 14.375 ms
7 uu194-7-242-205.unknown.uunet.be (194.7.242.205) 11.214 ms 7.786 ms 8.543 ms
8 uu194-7-242-201.unknown.uunet.be (194.7.242.201) 10.411 ms 8.841 ms 9.023 ms
9 so-3-0-0.xr2.bru2.alter.net (146.188.2.121) 8.792 ms 9.223 ms 9.005 ms
10 so-1-0-0.tr2.bru2.alter.net (146.188.9.153) 11.849 ms 10.144 ms 11.786 ms
11 so-7-1-0.tr1.ams2.alter.net (146.188.15.225) 13.349 ms 12.818 ms 12.397 ms
12 pos1-0.br1.ams3.alter.net (146.188.3.214) 12.849 ms 13.775 ms 12.857 ms
13 pos4-0.core2.amsterdam.level3.net (146.188.67.202) 15.719 ms 12.937 ms 12.696 ms
14 so-4-0-0.mp2.amsterdam1.level3.net (4.68.113.82) 13.680 ms 13.982 ms 12.900 ms
15 ae-1-0.bbr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.30) 23.811 ms as-1-0.bbr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.97) 23.178 ms ae-1-0.bbr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (212.187.128.30) 23.395 ms
16 ae-31-53.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.94) 33.517 ms ae-32-56.ebr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.190) 23.688 ms ae-31-55.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.68.118.158) 23.166 ms
17 ae-4-4.car2.milan1.level3.net (4.69.133.137) 32.141 ms 31.910 ms ae-1-100.ebr2.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.69.132.126) 29.827 ms
18 dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.26) 32.716 ms ae-4-4.car2.milan1.level3.net (4.69.133.137) 32.112 ms dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.26) 32.570 ms
19 dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.142) 33.288 ms so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 51.075 ms dante.car2.milan1.level3.net (213.242.65.142) 42.808 ms
20 so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 38.728 ms so-7-2-0.rt1.fra.de.geant2.net (62.40.112.22) 37.665 ms so-6-3-0.rt1.gen.ch.geant2.net (62.40.112.33) 37.290 ms
21 so-1-3-0.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.112.54) 41.656 ms 43.051 ms so-7-2-0.rt1.fra.de.geant2.net (62.40.112.22) 37.016 ms
22 restena-gw.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.124.150) 43.677 ms so-1-3-0.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.112.54) 42.767 ms 42.155 ms
23 gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 42.558 ms restena-gw.rt1.lux.lu.geant2.net (62.40.124.150) 48.978 ms gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 51.384 ms
24 gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 47.132 ms gate-2-v33.bce.restena.lu (158.64.16.38) 44.242 ms gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 43.795 ms
25 gate-1-v26.rest.restena.lu (158.64.16.218) 44.614 ms 44.706 ms boaz (158.64.14.86) 43.837 ms !<10>
26 www.isoc.lu (158.64.14.86) 42.866 ms !<10> 42.585 ms !<10> 41.996 ms !<10>

This time we go from Luxembourg to Brussels, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Milan and Geneva and finally back at home. 15 hops last year. 21 this year.

Much of the blame goes to Verizon, who consistenly declined to peer at the local internet Exchange, citing the fact that the peering vould be very uneven.

According to the local press, PayPal has decided to settle its European offices in Luxembourg. To this effect PayPal has been granted a banking license. After Skype and eBay itself, this is the third company from the eBay group to select Luxembourg as its main European office. This is good news for the economy.

This is also good news for the local users. Hopefully, it will soon be possible to transfer money from a PayPal account to a Luxemburgish bank account.   At this very moment, if you select Luxembourg from this web page, you are being told you can transfer funds to a US bank account…

At long last, the incumbent operator, P&T, has upgraded its ADSL infrastructure to the ADSL2+ standard. As a result, download speeds now range from 2 to 15 Mbits/s.  This is  most welcome, as  it moves Luxembourg back into the top 30 leading countries with broadband access. The icing on the cake is that this is being done with no additional subscription fees.

Many competing ISPs (Visual Online, Luxembourg Online, Alternet, Tele2)  use the P&T infrastructure. Hence , their offers have been adapted, too. I guess it will only take weeks before the competing infrastructure provider, Cegecom, will offer the same speeds, too.

A few months ago, the Luxembourg chapter of ISOC launched a survey among the Internet users. The main finding was that the users were unhappy with the slowish speed of their “broadband” connection. While I would not dare to say that this report changed the landscape, I think it nevertheless contributed to speed up the deployment of the new DSLAMs.

Which much fanfare, several public and private partners launched a company called LuxTrust which sells SSL certificates for web sites. Why on earth we need yet another certificate authority is beyond me. I guess this is a matter of national pride. Previously, the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce sold Globalsign certificates. Globalsign is a Belgian company.

There are still a few glitches, though. As can be seen from this screenshot, LuxTrust still needs the right certificates for themselves. Although they claim their certificates are compatible with 99% of the browsers on the market today, it failed with my browser (Firefox 2.0.x) .

And, by the way, if you are a not-for-profit and cannot afford those expensive certificates, get a free one from CACert. If you just need encryption when you do not want people to send their passwords in clear text over the wire, this is just what you need.

The CACert root certificate is installed by default on many Linux distributions, as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. For other OSes and browsers, you only need to install their root certificate. This web site, as well as the web site and sub web sites of ISOC Luxembourg use it.

A while ago, I pointed out the very bad decision taken by Dexia-BIL bank in Luxembourg to use a Macromedia Flash applet to defeat phishing attempts. Competition being what it is, the number one bank in Luxembourg, BCEE, could not afford to sit and watch. They just copied the idea.

As was pointed out in the case of Dexia-BIL, the system is very user-unfriendly. However, customer-friendliness does not seem to be part of the equation.

Somehow, banks feel responsible for the fact that their customers are clueless when it comes to Internet e-mail. Rather than educating them, they think it is smart to protect these poor souls against themselves and their naivety. Or it could be the legal department telling the IT guys they have to find a way for the bank not to be held liable in case a customer would sue them if he fell victim of a phising e-mail.

So, again let us remind the banks and their customers how to fight phishing attempts:

• Use common sense. A reputable bank does not send e-mails asking for personal information they should already have. Actually, a bank does not use e-mail to communicate with customers. They are convinced you are always available to walk to their branch office during office hours, and that you have nothing better to do.
• Ask your ISP to filter out phising attempts in incoming e-mail messages. The cost is low. Open source tools do a wonderful job at that. MailScanner and Amavis-new do it for free. If your ISP wants to spend a lot of money, there are commercial products, too. If it is unwilling to do that, there is still client-side software. But you should rather move to an ISP which cares about its customers. In the “ISP” acronym, “S” stands for “Service”. If there is no service, vote with your feet.
• Avoid broken mail clients that display HTML by default.
• Double check the hyperlink you are clicking on.

And if you are too dumb to do any of the above, avoid accessing your bank account through the Internet and go to the branch office for every transaction. At least, this will give additional work to the clerk behind the desk and maybe he will be able to keep his job, rather than being fired because “customers use the Internet anyway”.