[plug] 4G modem advice

[Gregory Orange]

Thanks Chris. I'm trying to avoid re-jigging or a server for this, so
if it costs $200 (we'll see about that Netgear) then that will be
okay. Routing around NBN for these folks is looking like a huge
performance boost: a simple speed test on my phone at their place
showed great (3x? 10x? Can't remember) boosts to latency, uplink and
downlink speeds. Poor old 'NBN' (ha!) Satellite just can't compete.

I'm also considering my old iiNet BobLite which I think had a SIM
slot, or maybe it was just a USB slot and I'd need a modem. I'll see
if I threw it out when we went to NBN. Cue rant...

That's another failed part of NBN - nearly all existing modems get
chucked, and people don't know what to do with them, so they go to
landfill. Techs who were already onsite in every neighbourhood could
easily have been lumped with collecting them all up, which I'm sure
they would have been unimpressed about, but that's a lesser problem
that could have been solved too.
On Wed, 8 Aug 2018 at 10:19, Chris McCormick <chris at mccormick.cx> wrote:
>
> Hi Greg,
>
> On 06/08/18 20:15, Gregory Orange wrote:
> > Looking at it again, it would need a USB modem as well, to house the SIM
> > and actually make the connection. I'd rather avoid that complexity for
> > the user in question.
>  > They've got WiFi already, so they could plug
>  > it into that.
>
> Just another data point for you: at home we are running one of those USB
> modem sticks plugged into a Xubuntu machine under our TV with the USB
> dongle interface shared by that machine (via network manager UI) over
> our existing WiFi router network.
>
> I initially tried to plug it directly into our old router (which has a
> USB slot that I've used with 3g dongles in the past) but new dongles
> present to the system as a USB network device instead of a TTY modem and
> this confused the router to no end.
>
> I also had to do some re-jigging to stop the router giving out DHCP
> addresses and let the shared/proxied-dongle do it instead.
>
> Anyway, this setup works great.
>
> Given that 4G is fast and the plan is competitive with our old naked
> ADSL plan (100Gb for $70 per month) this has enabled us to route around
> the NBN completely, much to my delight.
>
> We're using the cheapest pre-paid Optus dongle - I think it was $39 from
> the post office. I'm pretty sure there are similar Telstra ones.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Chris.
>
> --
> http://mccormick.cx/



--
Gregory Orange