Backup internet

[Ssayer]

Quick update. It has to be tower stuff. I woke up this morning to a good (3 bar - RSRP -98 , RSSI -64) 4G LTE that's giving me a solid 70-100 down and 20 up on a band that I hadn't seen before. I looked it up on cellmapper and it originates on a tower very close to the one that gives/gave me 5G. Still no 5G and obviously I'll keep monitoring it, but I won't complain in the meanwhile if the connection continues as is. I'm told on the T-Mobile forum that's it's probably cell tower work as T-Mobile is really ramping up the home internet. As we all know, any time you get bleeding edge stuff, you tend to bleed once in a while.

I've barely started looking into the antennas. They aren't cheap, eh?

 

[Ssayer]

I'm sort of feeling like I've hijacked a thread, but... one more... I've got 5G again on the same band I had it on early yesterday. I'm not there, so I can't be 100% positive, but I had to rotate the can about 25° to get the strongest signal, which would seem to infer that it is now on a different tower?? Anyway, speeds are back.

 

[biggen]

Environmental conditions, being assigned a different sector panel on the tower, tower congestion, the room your cellular hotspot is in and the surroundings in said room, etc.. will all contribute to signal/speed differences.

 

[Nunofya]

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.

So, @Ssayer directed me to your post cause I have T-Mobile home internet and need to accesses BI way from home on my phone. Don't have a lot of computer skills, really none, had to google VPS. Is there a way to get a step by step process for this? I already did zerotier but don't know if I did it right. When it's enabled on my phone, cant access anything else with my phone (ring, smart lights, etc.), says it doesn't have internet access.

 

[bp2008]

@Nunofya

I never used ZeroTier on a phone but I think it works by adding a VPN connection. VPNs are often used to redirect internet traffic, but your zerotier network won't have been set up for that. So you need to find that option and disable it. According to a thing I read, it might be called "Enable Default Route" and you just need to turn that off.

 

[Nunofya]

@Nunofya

I never used ZeroTier on a phone but I think it works by adding a VPN connection. VPNs are often used to redirect internet traffic, but your zerotier network won't have been set up for that. So you need to find that option and disable it. According to a thing I read, it might be called "Enable Default Route" and you just need to turn that off.

Where would I find "Enable Default Route," on my android phone or zerotier on my computer?

 

[bp2008]

on the phone

 

[Nunofya]

on the phone

Can't find where that's at. On phone, says " this device is connected to zerotier one". I then open vpn setting and the options in zerotier are, enable "always-on VPN and "Block connections without VPN", both are off.

 

[Nunofya]

I can access BI with my phone with zerotier enabled, but that's all I can do with my phone. It's as if the phone has no internet access when zerotier is enabled.

 

[bp2008]

It may be something you can set only during setup. Try removing the zerotier network from your phone and add it again, take note of any additional settings it offers.

 

[NightLife]

The only thing I'm missing now is having a LOT of drinkable water stored, and have a LOT of shelf stable food stored. I'll work on those next

I've also have some of these on the way, so me and my wife can "Text" during an emergency when everything down.



It will be cool to be able to walk around the area and report back what I see

"Baby .. you will NOT BELIEVE the trash on the street out here!!!!" unholstering glock


There are some pretty tech savvy guys out there that are powering their dish via DC instead of AC, and say it's saving energy. As well some of those wattage figure may include the defrost element. In your locale you wouldn't need that. Google the DC thing. Yeah, it's not cheap, but as someone noted it's free of infrastructure (in your area), but I guess you still have to consider the ground stations your dish would be accessing, as will as your home PoP.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I just cancelled T-Mobile. The connection started going to hell, and being unusable. I now have the Verizon 5G Home Internet. Same price $50, no contract, no cap. Best yet, no CGNAT! Full bridge mode









Speed is overall slower, however MUCH more consistent and stable, and much lower latency

 

[fenderman]

I just cancelled T-Mobile. The connection started going to hell, and being unusable. I now have the Verizon 5G Home Internet. Same price $50, no contract, no cap. Best yet, no CGNAT! Full bridge mode

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Speed is overall slower, however MUCH more consistent and stable, and much lower latency

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Reply, I tested this for my office. I ran into issues with inconsistent speeds. More importantly when placing it into ip-passthrough mode speeds became virtually unusable. Support was useless.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Reply, I tested this for my office. I ran into issues with inconsistent speeds. More importantly when placing it into ip-passthrough mode speeds became virtually unusable. Support was useless.

With Verizon? That's interesting

I wonder if its heavily dependent on signal and the number of users. So far it seems like Verizon's internal network is much better than T-Mobile, at least over here

 

[fenderman]

With Verizon? That's interesting

I wonder if its heavily dependent on signal and the number of users. So far it seems like Verizon's internal network is much better than T-Mobile, at least over here

Yes, I got the Black cube - the "business" version. Support doesnt even know what bridge mode or ip-passthrough mean. If you are selling a product to a business you need to provide solid support. I agree, its heavily dependent on signal. I am paying my cable company 250 a month for 75/15 and a single phone line for fax - I know I know - we like the analog fax. Everything else is voip so we need a solid connection.

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

Fax?

 

[Flintstone61]

I'm running that white box, as well, but as primary...now. It was backup for awhile I gave it a trial to see if it would work in this location.
Had Xfinity go as low as $35 to stay on as a customer the second time i called to cancel....I almost went back.....but I wanted to give this Verizon a chance.
I'm near a Freeway with good Cell tower signal.
I'm getting 185-324 down....and 18-26 up right now...when i was the only kid on the block with a white box i was 298-324 all day long....I think we got traffic now...so I see variability.....But for home owner use its been good for this location.
I wonder if the firmware revisions on your newer box give you a different feature set...

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

The service is a very new here, hopefully it doesn't go downhill like T-Mobile did

The problem with T-Mobile was that their network was very ipv6 oriented. It felt like the ipv4 network was the last thing they were thinking about. The problem is that doing dual WAN with ipv6 is tough, so I was using only ipv4 and it wasn't great. So far Verizon seems better there

 

[IReallyLikePizza2]

I'm running that white box, as well, but as primary...now. It was backup while I gave it a rial to see if it would work in this location.
Had Xfinity go as low as $35 to stay on as a customer the second time i called to cancel....I almost went back.....but I wanted to give this Verizon a chance.
I'm near a Freeway with good Cell tower signal.
I'm getting 185-324 down....and 18-26 up right now...when i was the only kid on the block with a white box i was 298-324 all day long....I think we got traffic now...so I see variability.....But for home owner use its been good for this location.
I wonder if the firmware revisions on your newer box give you a different feature set...

It seems more feature rich than the T-Mobile box, but I'm pretty much only using it to passthrough to my own firewall. It does give you less signal information than T-Mobile, but since it seems to get so much better signal, I don't really care

T-Mobile started great, but then it started kicking me off the fast N41 band, and on to the N71 band which is much slower. I moved it and managed to fix that, but then a while later the latency would go through the roof. Seemed like a very incomplete product

 

[Flintstone61]

In my uneducated joe 5 pack opinion,,,,all of my Viet family keeps buying t-mobile bsed on price alone......as well as my cheap ass friends....Here in Little Mekong I feel as though the T-mobile may have more users and more network congestion, and in key locations( locations where I needed it regularily) it had shitty cell tower reception and it failed me....as a Commercial vehicle operator.
Verizon costs more here.....but the reception in the Metro is great.....
whatever........I have a chip on my shoulder about T-mobile...