GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 671688
Add ability to mark a provider as requiring roaming
Last modified: 2014-03-10 18:39:13 UTC
Created attachment 209289 [details] [review] Patch to add requires-roaming attribute Some providers, MVNO's like Cubic and MaxxRoam, provide SIMs which are always roaming. It would be nice to keep track of this in the mbpi so that network managers can *ignore* any user settings which say, "do not allow roaming". SIM cards from MaxxRoam and Cubic *alway* require roaming. The user's preference should be ignored. I've attached a patch which adds an attribute to the provider.
Sounds reasonable; though I wonder if there isn't a way to override the roam indicator bits with the service provider tables in the SIM instead; if it's a "well-known" network and we're supposed to force the SP name instead of the registered network name, maybe then we call the network a "home" network? The issue I see here is that the home/roaming determination I believe is a *SIM* determination based on the table of PLMNs known to the SIM in different registers, so if they one day start setting up their SIMs correctly then our attribute in the MBPI is now wrong and broken. So I think before we apply this we should do a bit of checking and figure out if there's a more foolproof way of handling the home/roaming thing.
This is less an issue of "setting up their SIMs correctly" and more an issue of design. Maxraom SIM cards are designed to have no home network. They are always roaming. I do not expect us to ever find information on the SIM card that would sort this out. http://www.maxroam.com/Home.aspx?cur=USD I am currently trying to get them to respond as well.
After communicating with people at cubictelecom, I'm not sure that I see any better way of addressing this. chris@cubictelecom.com Hi guys, Yes apologies for the delay in response. The SPN for Cubic is set at the time of manufacturer – and can vary, though we tend to keep it stable especially since at the moment the Chromebooks use the SPN for setting the APN. The reason I suggested ICCID was that it is constant for us, we have the range 8942306***************** which could be used to set the APN. This would be perfect for Cubic Telecom, as based on this you could set our generic speedidata.com APN and enable data roaming.
See bug 726052 for always-roaming registrations; i.e. those provided by virtual operators. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 726052 ***