Re: Extending the mobile-broadband-provider-info database

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2011-07-19 at 15:06 +0300, Oleg Zhurakivskyy wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am working on GRPS provisioning plugin for oFono open source telephony stack. 
> This plugin should make it possible for oFono to automatically configure GPRS 
> contexts based on information from the provider database. There's an idea to use 
> the mobile-broadband-provider-info package as the provider database.
> 
> Is this the correct list to discuss the issue?

Yes.

> In order to distinguish in between different kind of access point types of the 
> same operator, there's a need to add a few tags, so the access point type 
> (wap/mms/prepaid) could be reliably detected.

Yep, this is something I've thought about, and it's something we should
do.  However, keep in mind that some APNs are both prepaid and postpaid;
for example T-Mobile in the US uses the same APN for *all* subscribers
and differentiates billing on the backend.  So we need to be careful
here and not use the 'prepaid' type when we're not sure what the
operator layout is.

> Will adding the additional tags/tag specifiers bring any incompatibility 
> problems for the software that already uses the database?

As long as the attributes we add aren't required, it should be fine to
add them.  See the balance check stuff that was added a while ago; that
was added in a compatible manner and existing tools simply ignore the
new attributes.

> I am not an expert on XML, which would be the preferred way to add the tag?
> 
> 1.
> <apn value="apn1" type="wap">
> ...
> </apn>
> 
> 2.
> <apn value="apn1">
> <type>wap</type>
> ...
> </apn>

I prefer #1 for this case.  Further things like this should probably not
be part of the 'apn' tag though simply for readability.

> So the type would be the enumeration of values (internet|prepaid|wap|mms). 
> Perhaps, there's no need to mark access points as "internet" (since the majority 
> of them are "internet" anyway), just extending wap, mms, predaid with the proper 
> tag would be sufficient. What do you think?

Yes, I think simply wap|prepaid|mms would be better.  There's also the
distinction between datacard and phone internet APNs as some operators
use one APN for home-based mobile broadband and another for phone-based,
but I don't think we need to handle that for now.

The core issue is that we're trying to apply some organization to this
mess, and we can go too far :)  But I think wap|prepaid|mms is a great
start for now.

Looking forward to a patch!

Dan


> Thanks in advance!
> 
> Regards,
> Oleg
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