Feel free to talk about it at !tmobileisp@lemmy.ml. i used to be a mod of r/tmobileisp until i deleted my reddit. I made it on lemmy to catch anyone coming over

i was wondering when you were going to pull a wad of gum out of your mouth to finish it off like macguyver. that’s some solid reworking of the tech! nice one

Having a directional antenna is great. If you check the logs on your modem you should be able to see the identifier for the tower you’re connecting to. Using that you can pinpoint it’s location. If you’re really dedicated you can build a tower outside to put a directional antenna above the tree line.

Or at least, that’s what we would have technicians do for customers in rural areas.

Nice!

I had to do similar with mine but threw together some scrap lumber to build up around our printer:

We’ve had an LTE modem for a long while which is quite expensive but no data cap. Just recently added T-mobile’s 5G Lite modem which while much faster does have a cap. So added a pfSense firewall and setup a failover WAN rule to give the work computer 5G during business hours.

Woah, that’s a lot of mods! I had the same service for a couple years. It was actually more reliable than the copper in our old apartment, because they ran all the cables into an underground box filled with water (Florida). It was a good price too!

I used to rely on my very old grandfathered in unlimited Verizon plan + a phone purchased direct from Samsung so I could use the Wi-Fi hotspot. It worked great 6 years ago when I moved to the country, but it’s been getting worse and worse as more people moved to the area.

I switched to starlink about a year ago. I have a lot of trees though so I needed to get the dish up high. So I bought a Rohn antenna tower and installed it. I had occasional short outages early on while the satellite network was still growing, but that’s pretty rare now.

I thought I had a pic on my phone, but I’ve gotten a new phone since then.

Are we posting botched together cellular setups? Here’s mine:

Pretty much using this exact setup for about 5 years now. Didn’t want to place the antenna outside so I just mounted it in my attic and zip-tied a Netgear MR1100 to it.

Ran very well for years but it’s starting to show that our LTE network is simply overloaded when everyone is watching Netflix.

On the upside, I should be getting fiber in a month or two so I can finally throw this contraption out. No 5G here yet but with fiber coming soon I won’t bother with the overpriced 5G modems.

Starlink not an option?

I assume it’s a 5G unit? If so, are you locked to that thing, or can you buy your own?

Around here I’ve mostly seen outdoor mountable units - 5G does best with short to no external antennas, so it is sensible to keep the router on the roof or balcony pointing the right direction.

I have an older 4G installation as backup link here with external antennas, plus a 5G backup link with the router mounted next to the 4G antenna.

Make the coax as short as possible by relocating you router if you can. That’ll improve signal strength by reducing cable loss!

Dang that is a ton of mods. I have mine installed as a fail over pointing out of my basement window. I think one of my next goals for my setup is to setup a VPN or something to be able to forward my self hosted stuff when my main line is down too.

I just switched from Xfinity 1200 Mbps cable to Verizon 5GUW home internet @ 350Mbps. The Verizon plan has been consistently outperforming the Xfinity plan. It was really unreliable\flaky. I’d drop work calls and data transfers, or get booted from games multiple times a week. I opened so many tickets over the course of 5 years and it never really improved. My Verizon plan has been rock solid for about 6 mo now. Also the Xfinity plan was ~$120/mo. Verizon is locked in at $35/mo for 10 years and no data caps. I’m not gonna be looking back.