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.
Local Thieves using Wi-Fi Jammer
A few days ago a couple of Houston’s local TV stations ran a story about thieves using a Wi-Fi jamming device in order to defeat the common wireless security cameras. This sort of thing is very triggering for me. I have long believed that Wi-Fi, while convenient, is not your friend. Things that you truly rely upon should be physically connected to your network. By “physically connected “ I mean Ethernet. Accept no substitutes.
We have a handful of surveillance cameras hereabouts. They are all connected via Ethernet. It provides both connectivity and power. This way, they are powered from the Eaton UPS that runs the network core. The network stays up even when utility power is lost.
T-Mobile 5G: An Experiment with Fixed Wireless Internet Access
In the next few weeks we’ll crest the first anniversary of Hurricane Beryl, which had quite an impact hereabouts. In the storm we lost power for a less than two days. However, our Comcast/Xfinity internet access was out for a week. As someone who works full-time from a home office, that was a problem for me. As a contract IT worker, no internet access means no money. No buénno.
My laptop, a Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen7 from 2019, has the optional 4G mobile data access module. It’s part of our Mint Mobile family plan. So, at some level I can be online with just the laptop. That provides a minimal level of productivity.
Similarly, I can tether my desktop and perhaps one or two small devices to my mobile phone. That’s ok for an afternoon, but not a good solution for a week or more.
The 4G speed test on the laptop screen reflects 4G LTE access, not 5G. Also, Mint Mobile data rates are often lower than T-Mobile’s own clients. Even though T-Mobile now owns Mint, the MVNO customers are given lower priority on the network.
Then it occurred to me that all the mobile carriers had been promoting fixed wireless service in the neighborhood. In post-Beryl Houston, power was out at our home, but not too far away there was a T-Mobile store that was open for business as usual. They had a 5G fixed wireless devices for $0 with $60/month and no contract term. It seemed like potentially a good solution. At least, there was little to risk in trying it on for size.
New Gear: JetKVM is really very handy!
Late last year I supported the Kickstarter for JetKVM. This device is a tiny little IP-KVM solution. It’s basically a refined package of everything involved in a PiKVM. Connect HDMI & USB from a computer-to-be-controlled, and Ethernet. Then the web interface on the JetKVM device allows that device to be remote controlled using just a web browser from anywhere there’s IP connectivity.
I had actually forgotten that I supported the project until one day a pair the wee devices arrived. It happens that I’ve been meaning to work on a KVM solution for my home office.