
Migrating Russian eagles run up data roaming charges - bauc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-50180781
======
maxden
Reminds 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/)

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qwerty456127
Isn'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.

~~~
cnst
It'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).

~~~
hkai
Why should the company sell SMS in relation to its cost? The seat selection on
a plane costs literally zero for the company but people pay like 50 USD to
seat at the front.

A phone company just needs to find creative ways to earn profit. Why is it
evil?

~~~
qwerty456127
It is evil when it's unreasonably expensive. The fact just a small number of
people would use it in their sane mind even though there is capacity to serve
much more people at no additional expense for the provider (nor for the
environment) suggests there is no reason to keep prices this high.

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IIAOPSW
Instead of mobile phones, they should just switch over to IP via Avian
Carrier.

~~~
MrOxiMoron
That's a problem when your research subject eats the carriers for breakfast
;-)

~~~
ummwhat
Literally taken from the wiki page on IPoAC

[https://i.imgur.com/DUH5Kre.png](https://i.imgur.com/DUH5Kre.png)

~~~
andreareina
Not 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)

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notatoad
It'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...](https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/why-do-vultures-care-about-the-
spanish-portuguese-border)

------
sargram01
Roaming 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
Well, the EU banned them several years back. One might consider that one of
its biggest legislative triumphs :D

~~~
wolfi1
just inside the EU, if you are going anywhere outside it's going to be
expensive again

~~~
srg0
My 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.

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DoubleGlazing
This 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
What 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
There 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
Wouldn't be surprised if matchbox size is too big already.

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mikece
I 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
The 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.

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secfirstmd
In 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.

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mvexel
Here's the interactive map: [https://gps.aquila-it.pl/en/migration-
maps/steppe-eagle-russ...](https://gps.aquila-it.pl/en/migration-maps/steppe-
eagle-russia-kazakhstan)

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technofiend
Missed opportunity for Google Fi to offer up some data-only SIMs to emphasize
their service and pricing.

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buboard
I d never guess they were so cosmopolitan

~~~
orthoxerox
Even people researching them for a living made a mistake this time.

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novaRom
Looking at the map, I wonder how light pollution affects their migration
routes.

~~~
meristem
Eagles are a diurnal migratory species.

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pvaldes
A 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
I'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
As it says in the article, they are now on a different tariff.

There are special tariffs for this type of usage.

