Re: [PATCH] device: prefer wifi over wwan by default

[Tore Anderson <tore fud no>]

* Jean-Christian de Rivaz

> Le 22. 07. 15 17:56, Dan Williams a écrit :
> > I'm OK with this too, though the original idea was that more
> > "intentional" connections would be preferred.  eg, WWAN is a lot less
> > automatic than WiFi, and often costs you more money, thus if you
> > activate a WWAN device you probably want to use it...

My thinking is that if a user manages the connections manually (i.e.,
autoconnect=false) then he'll most likely ensure that the one he wants
to be used at any given time is the only one that's active.

I, on the other hand, just want to be on-line whenever I can, so I
simply use autoconnect=true for all available connections. Now I just
need Aleksander to figure out what's going on in fdo#90973 and
everything'll be just peachy. :-)

BTW: nm-applet shows the WiFi icon if both WiFi and WWAN is connected
simultaneously, so unless the user checks his routing table he might
not be aware that WWAN is being used instead of WiFi. So this patch
brings NM in line with the preference order nm-applet has been
indicating all along.

> While WiFi at least imply that the user select an SSID, there exists SIM 
> cards that are delivered configured to not require a PIN code or a APN 
> password from the user.

This reminded me of something I've been wondering about for a while:
What is the reason why NM asks me to select country, provider, APN and
so on when connecting to mobile broadband for the first time? It seems
kind of user-unfriendly - MM/NM knows my operator's MCC/MNC (can be
seen in "mmcli -m 0 -i 0"), which can be used to immediately locate the
correct <provider> block in serviceproviders.xml. Assuming there's only
one data APN present in that <provider> block, it could simply be used
by default without asking anything. Android and SailfishOS does so,
FWIW - so there's no technical reason (sans PIN codes or APN
username/passwords of course) that WWAN couldn't be connected to in an
automatic fashion like wired Ethernet, for example.

Another reason why asking the user to pick his provider from a list is
user-unfriendly is that quite often his provider is a MVNO whose name
won't be found in the list at all, resulting in confusion.

Tore