networking – Graves On SOHO Technology

Stormy Weather: An observation of POE Budget

Late the other afternoon we had a thunderstorm come through. Tis the season hereabouts. The wind picked up, pushing in dark clouds. The sky darkened quickly. Then the Unifi app on my Pixel 8 pinged to alert me to a network error. The network switch in our attic had exceeded its power-over-Ethernet (P.O.E.) budget.

What a novel set of events I thought. It was the first time I’d ever seen such a notification. I wonder why it occurred? It didn’t take long to work it out.

The device reporting the power problem is a Unifi USW Flex 5-port switch that lives in the attic. It receives power from the USW-24-POE main switch in the house. The POE+ (aka 802.11at) ports on the main switch can deliver up to 30 Watts over a single Ethernet cable. That is, up to its overall power budget of 95 Watts.

USW Flex can deliver up to 46 Watts when powered from a POE++ (aka 802.11bt) capable switch. When powered from mere POE+ the USW Flex is able to provide 20 Watts onward to network loads.

New Gear: Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup

Apologies for the lengthy preamble. Back in 2001 when we moved into this house we started with Comcast cable modem internet access that delivered 5/1 mbps. We were committed to Comcast for cable TV since we were a Tivo household. Tivo DVRs leveraged cable and the Cable Card decryption scheme.

It also happens that Comcast’s internet access was not very reliable. That caused me to get a DSL service installed as a backup. The DSL service provided by Sprint was modest. We are some 11,400 feet from the nearest central office, which meant that 1.5 Mbps / 768 kbps was the best we could achieve.

Over a number of years, Comcast’s cable modem service got both faster and (somewhat) more reliable. Still, I retained the relatively pokey DSL service as a backup. After Hurricane Ike in 2008 I felt vindicated in that choice. Throughout and after that terrible storm we had sustained phone and internet access via that DSL service. In contrast, Comcast was out for a month.

There came a time when I realized that I had not used the DSL in over a year. And 4G wireless broadband had become available, so I could tether to a phone in a pinch. That combination supported ending the DSL service, which suffered declining cost/performance.

All that is back-story. In all that time, we never had a “dual-WAN” arrangement. Failover between the ISPs was manual. Typically, repatch the WAN port of the router to the desired modem, then load a different WAN configuration. Not difficult. But manual.

Well, no longer! Last week I took delivery of the new Ubiquiti Unifi 5G Backup device. Newly introduced for just $99 this wee magic wand promises an affordable, automatic backup to a 5G wireless service. It’s not locked to any carrier. At the outset it works with AT&T, T-Mobile, and presumably their MVNOs.

Combination Wi-Fi Routers Are Dumb

The FCC made big news last month when it move to ban consumer routers made overseas. This got me thinking about consumer routers in general, and recalling back to when reliable Wi-Fi was something I was struggling to achieve. That was in the early days of this blog. I think that, in solving our Wi-Fi problem I failed to clearly state something that bears repeating now…combination Wi-Fi routers are dumb and should be avoided.

If you want to have consistent, reliable, Wi-Fi coverage, in a larger home or across an entire property, a combination Wi-Fi router at an arbitrary location is not going to be a good solution. You should be using dedicated Wi-Fi access points. And the location of each access point should be carefully considered.

Mint Mobile: 4G vs 5G UC

This is a follow-up on an earlier post which was an observation of a change in the mobile data service I was seeing from Mint Mobile here in Houston. I had another occasion to be off-site today, although much closer…

Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 7: Upgrading WWAN from 4G LTE to 5G

My laptop, a 2019 Lenovo X1 Carbon, was ordered with the optional WWAN interface. At the time, the state-of-the-art was a 4G radio which I added to our Mint Mobile account. I only need to use mobile data occasionally, but it has proven very handy.

Several months ago I noted that it suffered very poor performance at a meeting off-site. This even as my mobile phone was working much better.

Earlier this week, while I was taking Stella to an appointment in another part of the city, the laptop reported being completely offline. It was wholly unable to connect via 4G. I looked at my mobile phone, which reported connected via “5G UC.”

Extreme Power Over Ethernet

If you’ve been reading hereabouts for some time, you likely know that I am an advocate for power-over-ethernet. In it’s earliest days, almost twenty (!) years ago, I started blogging in order to share my experience combining working from a home office full-time, leveraging broadband-over-DSL and IP telephones.

SIP/IP telephones and Wi-Fi access points are natural gateways into P.O.E. That’s certainly how I got started. At first, I used POE insertors. As the number of POE-capable devices mounted, I migrated to Ubiquiti Unifi POE switches.