Backup internet

I tried one of them T mobile devices, same exact one in the picture first post and had real high hopes for high speed broadband.

Same as you I walked it all over the house and yard best I could get and hold it was 2 bars.

Using a wireless connection between it and my computer was 30 to 50mbps. Great much faster than my land based ISP (DSL uverse) even at that. Then I plugged in a cable to its network switch on the back of it for a wired connection to it and wow it'd hit 250+ mbps.

Thought I was in WWW heaven problem was no routeable address not bridgeable no nothing really so no way in from the outside = pretty much useless to me.

My youngest boy moved to his own place, sent it with em.

Rare event our internet goes out is usually due to power outage, have to fire up the generator anyway so no need to keep it.
 
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@xplorer Wow, your local wifi conditions must be really poor for it to perform that badly compared to cellular.

If I needed a public routable IPv4 address that the ISP would not provide, I would rent a cheap virtual private server (VPS) somewhere for about $5 a month and install something like pfsense on it if possible. Then a router at my house would connect as a VPN client to the pfsense VM in the cloud. Then some NAT and firewall rules should make it possible to forward ports through the VPN connection almost as if I had a public IPv4 at home.
 
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bp2008 said:
@xplorer Wow, your local wifi conditions must be really poor for it to perform that badly compared to cellular.

If I needed a public routable IPv4 address that the ISP would not provide, I would rent a cheap virtual private server (VPS) somewhere for about $5 a month and install something like pfsense on it if possible. Then a router at my house would connect as a VPN client to the pfsense VM in the cloud. Then some NAT and firewall rules should make it possible to forward ports through the VPN connection almost as if I had a public IPv4 at home.
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I believe the lower speed wifi connection with it was probably more due to the age of the wireless nic I was using, my nic is probably just too outdated paired with it.

I shouldn't have said "routable" rather an ISP that I can VPN into, a bridgeable device. I ordered it hoping that that hotspot and its higher speeds might replace DSL for me but with no inbound abilities that idea failed.
 
xplorer said:
I shouldn't have said "routable" rather an ISP that I can VPN into, a bridgeable device. I ordered it hoping that that hotspot and its higher speeds might replace DSL for me but with no inbound abilities that idea failed.
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Well like I said, you can always rent a cheap cloud server to route incoming connections through. But that approach does have its downsides, not least of which is requiring quite a good amount of networking knowledge to set it up.
 
bp2008 said:
Well like I said, you can always rent a cheap cloud server to route incoming connections through. But that approach does have its downsides, not least of which is requiring quite a good amount of networking knowledge to set it up.
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Yup sounds like a tad over my head that and I was hoping for a quick switch and all around faster speeds but faster "up" speed if nothing else.

Speed down while slow real slow compared most anything else it is fast enough for example to stream HD video most of the time, rare I do that sort of thing but can. The up speed @ .80 Mbps really rather sucks for remotely accessing cameras!
 
Funny this thread is still around because Comcast was out yesterday for over 8 hours in our neighborhood. A fiber line was cut in the neighborhood by a backhoe. My Peplink router handled it perfectly. Automatically switched to the TMobile SIM card inside it and inside the house you couldn’t even tell Comcast was down since the switch over is transparent to any Ethernet or wifi clients on my network. Meanwhile people on our neighborhood Facebook page that work from home were complaining all day they were losing money because they couldn’t work.
 
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biggen said:
Funny this thread is still around because Comcast was out yesterday for over 8 hours in our neighborhood. A fiber line was cut in the neighborhood by a backhoe. My Peplink router handled it perfectly. Automatically switched to the TMobile SIM card inside it and inside the house you couldn’t even tell Comcast was down since the switch over is transparent to any Ethernet or wifi clients on my network. Meanwhile people on our neighborhood Facebook page that work from home were complaining all day they were losing money because they couldn’t work.
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And yet they would still access Facebook :lmao: and I guess none of them thought to turn their cellphone into a hotspot and then connect their laptop to it and work from that.

Priorities LOL.
 
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OK! Lesson learned here. They tell you to turn it on unplugged (because it has a battery) and walk around your house to find the best signal, which you see by looking at the top of the modem (nothing else works unless it's plugged in). Walking around my house I got any where from 0 to 3 bars, usually 2. I found the most convenient/aesthetic 3 bar, plugged it in and tested it. 4G and around 60/12, I tried the two other 3 bar spots with about the same result. So, that's where I had it for what... 2 weeks? Anyway, after the 8 hours of 5G, I figured it was time to try again. Same thing.

Now, HERE is the lesson learned. It really is a dumb modem (almost as dumb as me, I guess). It doesn't tell you whether those bars are 4G or 5G on the top of that modem, just how many bars. This time, I grabbed one of my 550 UPSs and walked around with it actually working, where I could check things out with my cellphone. Lo and behold, a lot of those two bars were 5G! Now I did the walk around routine again, this time being able to check signal strength with it's app on my phone, and..... here it is:

Screenshot 2021-12-09 103128.jpg

Fantastic! So, anyone else considering this for a fast internet connection, be aware and don't be dumb like me...
 
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Another thing of note... The cell tower metrics are very different between the Android app and the Window's browser. I've been trying to fine fine tune it in, but heck, which do I believe at any given time...
 
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So... T-Mobile is staying, AT&T DSL is gone. We already know that the one caveat of what I have is that I can't view the cams from the outside world as is. I sort of like being able to at least know that my house still has electricity (and would like that and more). :p

1. My options are, figure out a way for VPN (VPS?) to work. This is currently all greek to me, but the best option.
2. When I'm not home, automatically take a screen shot every XX minutes, upload to a server, and view the screenshot there.
3. When I'm not home, automatically take a screen shot every XX minutes and send it to my email address.

Option 3 is easy peasy, but would give me a ton of worthless emails. With Option 2, I could simply overwrite the file and only see the latest, or combine and watch a quick video. Option 1 is by far the best if I could get it to work.

Any other thoughts/ideas/comments?
 
Hey all, so @Ssayer and I tried a couple of things to get that VPS and VPN tunnel going so he could remotely access his cams.

First was trying to run pfsense in a VPS from vultr.com, so we could use it as a wireguard server and use pfsense's interface to do the routing through to his Blue Iris box. But it was a pain to get pfsense installed, and halfway through configuring wireguard, the pfsense interface just stopped working with no explanation. Admittedly this was the "overkill" solution when all that was needed was Blue Iris remote access. So we scrapped that idea and just installed the zerotier client on the Blue Iris server and on a basic Debian virtual machine. Joined them both to the same network, and that was it. Connectivity achieved between the cloud VPS and Blue Iris machine.

To actually pass Blue Iris traffic through the zerotier tunnel, we put nginx on the VPS and configured the default nginx site to proxy the traffic to Blue Iris via zerotier according to the example nginx configuration in UI3's github wiki. I also got letsencrypt certificate with autorenewal set up. Since we were using a proxy server capable of HTTPS anyway, I figured why not. The only major stumbling point was realizing that Debian's default firewall was blocking the inbound communication to the VPS. That is solved by opening each desired TCP port via the command sudo iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -m tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT (where 80 is the port number).

I should note that the cloud VPS is technically optional when using Zerotier. If you install the Zerotier client on every device that needs to remotely access Blue Iris, then you can connect to the Zerotier network directly without needing a public routable IP address anywhere. Myself, I am not thrilled with that option because an always-on VPN is going to be a bit of a drain on battery life.
 
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I'd like to give a BIG Thank you to @bp2008 ! We're lucky to have someone with his knowledge and willingness to share it (and his TIME) here!

Thanks to his expertise, I now have it all... a fast connection AND internet access to Blue Iris! As he said, the cloud VPS is optional so long as everyone else uses Zerotier, but that requires setting up your family (and extended family! ) with Zerotier on their devices. If your people are like my people, well... It's well worth the few extra bucks to pay for the VPS. The fact that he was able to go through the hoops and make it work means that anyone with a wireless internet connection can get around the limitations and have it work.

As a side note, I now know how family and friends feel when I help them with their computer problems as I was totally out of my league with this one.
 
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Bwahahaha! So, now that I have my T-Mobile Wireless Home Internet set up and going great with an average of say 125+Mbps down and no data cap for $50 a month with taxes included (got my first bill and yep, that's it)... AT&T just sent me an offer because they are now offering Wireless Home Internet. Ready for this? 25Mbps on average, 350GB of monthly data for the low low price of $59.99 plus taxes IF you also have or get AT&T wireless phone service. Each additional 50GB is $10. Such a deal!!!
 
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Hah! I'm glad I don't have to feel that I jinxed myself. A few hours ago I got 552Mbps down on a speed test and was going to post about it but decided to just keep my trap shut for a while. Well... a couple of hours ago I lost 5G and my 4G is 1 to 2 bars back and forth. I've done all the quick and dirty reboots and cold reboots with no change. I've posted over at T-Mobile hoping to not have to go through Tier1 support. (heavy sigh :p :p :p )
 
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