Aleksander Morgado

ModemManager provides a general purpose WWAN management stack, which has served as default WWAN management system for standard GNU/Linux distributions for the last 10 years, primarily focused on providing data connectivity to laptops and desktops. In addition to that, different teams building phones with FOSS operating systems have also considered ModemManager as a good tool to take responsibility for the full data and voice call management in phones, primarily because it supports a broad range of devices and systems: not only standalone WWAN modules, but also WWAN stacks integrated in Qualcomm SoCs.

This talk will provide an overview of the current state of integration of ModemManager in phones, and what's expected in future releases.

Wireless connections have improved a lot lately and the data-rates and latencies that are now achievable with LTE make mobile broadband connections a key ingredient in every M2M recipe. But LTE mobile broadband connections in Linux-based systems are no longer setup using the good old AT+PPP pair. LTE-capable modems now use ECM-like network interfaces and even new control protocols, like QMI or MBIM.

This talk is about how the new LTE-capable devices are exposed in the Linux kernel (e.g. qmi_wwan, cdc-mbim...), and which user-space tools (e.g. ModemManager, libqmi, libmbim...) are available to control them. The talk will be a hands-on demonstration of how to use these modems with these tools, focused on what users need to do to use them properly, and also how developers can benefit from them to write new applications.

There was a time when all mobile broadband modems spoke AT commands over serial ports, and PPP was used to establish a network connection. Soon, each vendor ended up with its own AT dialect or, even worse, a completely new protocol: phonet, QCDM, QMI, WMC, MBIM... This talk is a general overview of these protocols, how and why they have evolved over time, and their current implementation and usage in Linux-based systems.

An overview of LTE/LTE-advanced technologies, and how ModemManager will work with LTE devices.

3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the new standard for high speed data communications, an evolution of the 3GPP-family of standards (GSM, UMTS...), but adopted also by CDMA networks as the next 4G technology. ModemManager is a project running under the freedesktop.org umbrella, which works with NetworkManager in order to provide easy setup of broadband mobile connections in Linux-based systems. The new 0.6 release of ModemManager will be able to handle mixed CDMA/LTE and GSM/UMTS/LTE devices. This talk will provide an overview of the new LTE and LTE advanced technologies, from both network and device points of view; present the new features arriving with this technology; and describe what is being done in ModemManager to be able to manage 4G devices.