Mobile Network Comparison

O₂ is causing misery for hundreds of patients and doctors at Sussex Royal County Hospital in Brighton. The large teaching hospital on the south coast is a flagship institution but mobile phone network O₂ recently removed a signal mast cutting off all their customers.

A doctor who didn’t want to be named claimed that working at the hospital was worse than working in the third world since the outage. They claimed that it was directly affecting the care of patients and made it effectively impossible to contact consultants or registrars. They went on to say the following:

In fact, it’s worse than that – in India you can make calls, at the hospital you get nothing. We can’t text, we can’t get through to our consultants and O₂ are just hiding behind their website.

Dr Hugh Harvey, a radiologist, said that O₂‘s removal of the mast “directly resulted in delay of patient care” and that it was a disaster for doctors who were on call.

In response, an O₂ spokesperson claimed that they were “progressing” alternatives ” with the utmost urgency ” in order to restore service. But critics pointed out that the mobile netowrk had been given several months to find an alternative location for the mast and, in the meantime, they were causing communication chaos for residents and medical staff. It wasn’t clear why O₂ had failed to provide alternative means to provide a phone network.

O₂ said that they were trying to get neighbouring masts to take over some of the blackout and also looking for new sites for another mast. However, the communication situation in the hospital is still dire and it’s a nightmare for patients wanting to communicate and liaise with family and friends.

As the mast serves people who live near the hospital too, many others have been affected. To add insult to injury (in some cases literally), O₂‘s response about compensation has simply been to just give extra credit to affected customers rather than providing any sort of solution. They aren’t even offering the option to end contracts early while the signal is still non-existent.

At present, there’s still no signal at Brighton hospital. Brighton and Hove city councillor Gill Mitchell has claimed that the whole palaver has been “an utter, utter cock-up”.

Are you a doctor or patient at Royal County Hospital? Or do you just live nearby? Have you been affected by this O2 cock-up? And what do you make of O₂‘s response and the fact they’ve had several months prior warning about this issue?

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Latest figures from a study by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) suggest that mobile internet advertising rocketed upwards in 2012. The study, conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, reported a total spend of over £500 million for mobile advertising in the UK last year. It’s thought that the massive increase in the popularity of smartphones and tablets and the affordability of budget Android options has contributed to this meteoric rise.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is one of the “big four” accountancy firms and a massive professional services provider. They conducted the research into digital advertising spending to get a better idea of the potential of mobile advertising in Britain.

Nowadays over 60% of the popular owns a smartphone and tablet sales show no sign of letting up. Because of this, mobile advertising grew over 100% in 2012. Broken down, search advertising contributed almost 70% of this spend as it rose over 160% from an already-decent £138 million in 2011.

Another factor that is increasing the money involved in mobile is an increased use of apps. The staggering rises in mobile spending overall saw the country’s digital ad spend across all types of device hit £5 billion for the first time ever (with Google incredibly accounting for about 60% of this). Mobile advertising’s share of that massively increased to about 10% with a spend of £526 million over all.

Our graph below clearly shows how UK mobile ad spend is rising far quicker than general internet advertising:

In fact, the year on year trend is incredible. Just 5 years ago the total mobile ad spend was just £25 million and it’s now risen to over 20 times that amount as of last year. As a percentage, the rises are even more staggering.

For example, in 2008 mobile spend accounted for just 1% of the UK’s total. But 2011 that proportion had quadrupled to 4%. But the most impressive rise of all was last year when the increase went from 4% of the total up to a massive 10%. It remains to be seen whether this level of almost-exponential growth will continue.

In comparison, the total UK advertising spend on the internet has been growing but at a much calmer, more steady rate. The average growth is just under about 20% year-on-year. This clearly pales when juxtaposed with the mobile figure which have seen a rise of over 100% each year and that percentage increase is continually getting bigger.

Tim Elkington, director of research and strategy at the Internet Advertising Bureau, thinks that the buzz around mobile is more or less unstoppable. Especially with the introduction of 4G services that will be rolled out to more users in 2013, it’s hard to argue with him. And social media is only just really find its feet in its attempts to monetise successfully. As services like Facebook and Twitter mature, it’s hard to see any let up in mobile advertising spending. In fact, social media alone accounted for over £300 million of spending which is up 300% compared to 2009.

What do you make of this report? Are you surprised by these figures? Do you see the trend continuing into next year?

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New research suggests that passenger jets could potentially be “hacked” with little more than a mobile phone. The disturbing news comes from security research and former pilot Hugo Teso who works in Mainz, Germany. The exploit shows how a hacker could actually influence the movement of a commercial airliner.

Teso presented his research at the Hack In The Box conference held in Amsterdam, Netherlands this week. His exploit involves the use of a Android smartphone app called PlainSploit which allows him to control the aircraft’s Flight Management Systems.

Modern aeroplanes have two major systems for communicating with other aircraft and with ground-based air traffic controllers:

The Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), sends information about each aircraft (identification, current position, altitude, and so on) through an on-board transmitter to air traffic controllers, and allows aircraft equipped with the technology to receive flight, traffic and weather information about other aircraft currently in the air in their vicinity.

The Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), is used to exchange messages between aircraft and air traffic controllers via radio or satellite, as well as to automatically deliver information about each flight phase to the latter.

The problem is that these technologies are old and dated and, as a result, incredibly insecure. Using both together, an attacker can gather information for a aeroplane’s on-board computer and even spoof signals that allow a hacker to affect the behaviour of the aircraft. Teso has developed an entire framework that allows you to control a ‘plane’s Flight Management System – it’s so complete there’s even scope for adding your own custom plug-ins.

Using live flight trackers such as Flightradar24, you can even hack into any aeroplane that is in range of your phone. The app is very advanced and you can dynamically change the aircraft’s course simply by tapping on a location on a map. You can also set conditional filters that will only activate when certain requirements are met. For example, you can wait until an aircraft is in its cruise phase over the ocean or above a certain ASL altitude and the crew are relaxing to activate certain commands. One of the most interesting features is that you can even control the lights and alarms in the aeroplane and the “Be Punkish” command allows a hacker to trigger lots of these at once. There’s even a humorously named “Visit Ground” command which caused the ‘plane to crash.

Don’t worry too much though next time you get on a flight. Each model of plan is different and only some commands will work on each one even though the app and framework does have a way of detecting what’s available. The other thing is that these commands only work when the ‘plane is set to autopilot so the pilots can always get complete control back and then flying using manual analogue control inputs. Most importantly, of course, Teso hasn’t publicly released the mechanism for all the exploits and has been working with the aviation industry to close the security flaws that allow this hack. The framework he developed was purposely restricted to virtual environments and cannot be used on real-life ‘planes.

However, having said that, on more modern digitised aeroplanes, it’s harder to detect the hacking in the first place and it’s uncommon to fly a plane without any automated assistance. And it’s certainly rather terrifying to learn how poor the security is on all these legacy systems. This is especially the case as aviation is an industry that prides itself on the importance of safety and security as well as redundant systems. Luckily, it does seem that manufacturers are keen to work on fixing the holes in their systems.

What do you make of this crazy story? Are you scared that people could control your flight with just a mobile phone? Why do you think that aircraft security is so poor? And do you expect to see more stories similar to this in the future? Let us know your thoughts below.

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