automatic APN selection

[Tore Anderson]

* Aleksander Morgado

>>> My team still has a feature like this on our product road map. Right now we've been waiting for the next FW release, which has as part of our analytics suite, the ability to gather basic APN & context info(& we have presence in ~55+ countries). We plan on cross referencing this against the AOSP, to build a hint type dbus helper, that given an MCC/MNC could provide a small focused selection of cell config's to the user to choice from. If you wanted to do auto from there it'd be pretty simple I think. Our team is pretty small and moves slowly though, and I don't think we'll get to this until next quarter. I have no reason we couldn't share it as an OS project.
>>
>> Than would be perfect. We can build on top of that really nice solution which can be used and I think a lot of companies doing it on it's own somehow so why not to have nice, solid stable solution ;). Can you pls share sources somewhere? Thanks a lot.
> 
> If you ask me, I would suggest this as a feature to the NetworkManager
> developers. There's no reason to build a new daemon on top of NM/MM to
> do this, NM could do this automatically (E.g. if enabled via a config
> option or something). At the end, NetworkManager already automatically
> creates settings for other devices (e.g. ethernet) so why not also
> create automatic settings for WWAN. The libnma library already has
> stable code to read and parse the mobile-broadband-provider-info
> database (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/network-manager-applet/blob/master/src/libnma/nma-mobile-providers.h)
> so it could be ported to NM codebase and just do a quick query based
> on SIM MCCMNC as soon as the SIM is exposed to look for possible APN
> settings to use.
With LTE, do you even need to manually specify an APN (or look it up in
a separate database)? I'm not an expert, but AIUI if you don't specify
an APN when attaching to LTE the UE should just use the operator
specified default APN. (Not sure if that works with NM/MM though.)

Tore