ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Alex Chiang <achiang@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 1:16 PM, Tony Espy <espy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 04/28/2014 03:30 PM, Chris Wayne wrote:
>> The use case for a carrier wanting their own APN database could be
>> having a special app that they want to allow zero-tariff data usage for
>> (e.g. their usage app, or maybe they have a deal with some site/app that
>> all data used is free for their customers).
>
> I'm not sure I understand your example.  We automatically provision GPRS
> contexts for network connnectivity and MMS support.  This provisioning is
> SIM-specific, and the result is a number of gprs contexts created ofono's
> gprs settings file:

In this example, imagine a carrier in China where they do not have
unlimited data plans, but rather you pay by the MB.

This carrier partners with the super popular Chinese Instagram clone
so that all data traffic on "Chinagram" is free. The carrier then
makes an awesome advertisement about how "Chinagram" is free on their
network and they sign up 300M new users.

All traffic going to/from "Chinagram" gets routed to
chinagram-zero-tariff.carrier.cn, whilst all other traffic goes to
apn.carrier.cn.

This is a fairly common use case. A more mundane example would be to
send all OTA updates from a zero-tariff APN and normal traffic over
the $ / MB APN.

(btw, the Chinagram example is 100% invented... ;)

> The only reason I see a carrier replacing our version of apns-conf.xml is if
> they've rolled out new APNs and/or have signed deals with MVNOs and want to
> ensure that the MVNO APNs are distributed.  Another reason would be to fix
> incorrect settings in our db.

The carriers may wish to update this db quite often, like once every month.

>> The one restriction we would have is that any file/db would have to live
>> in /custom.  Is this doable?
>
>
> Why wouldn't you just update the db in the device tarball? apns-conf.xml
> currently lives in /system/etc.

There is the delivery mechanism (tarball) and the installation
location (/system/etc vs /custom).

> Also re: /custom, from what currently documented on the wiki, it can only
> install things in /home/<user>.  IMHOP, that's not really the right place to
> be installing a system-specific db file.

I think the point here is that we want a mechanism to install
system-wide settings in /custom *in addition to* /system/etc/.

Agreed that /home is inappropriate.

> Note, for testing purposes ofono looks for an env var called
> OFONO_APNDB_PATH which is used to override the default location of
> apns-conf.xml.  This doesn't solve your problem directly, but something
> similar could be made to work if direct device tarball customization isn't
> sufficient.

That might work. A custom upstart job that sets the env var perhaps.

Thanks.