There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives | Hacker News Reader

There are six internet links on my office on wheels—seven when Starlink arrives

ghuntley.com

397 pointsghuntley277 comments

Just to share my own setup, I've been living in a van for the past year. I develop mostly via SSH and RDP so I found that any connection was important and total bandwidth wasn't the highest priority. Also in the US, way better coverage of 4g. Because of that invested fully in 4g and not at all in 5g.

* 11 in 1 Panorama External Antenna (LG-IN2447) around $500. 4 internal cradlepoint antennas, see photo below. In retrospect would not have invested so heavily in wifi antennas and bought more 4g. I also added a little antenna lifter to make sure it has line of site of all cell towers, I wanted it to be the highest point on my sprinter van roof.

* Cradlepoint IBR1700 1200M-B around $900 on ebay. Runs on 12 volt, a ton of antenna ports has 1 internal modem that supports big US carriers, came with an additional modem that does the same for carrier aggregation. A bunch of different ways to configure the router to aggregate links, mostly I switch back and forth manually, I found that if there was an issue it would be obvious and I could just switch the link. Cradlepoint software wouldn't handle issues and signal strength that well. Honestly one carrier has been plenty good for me though and between ATT and Verizon, I only have issues in the national parks where there are cell dead zones.

* Verizon and ATT 4g cell plans. I added 1 line on my family plan for Verizon and the same with a friends family plan with ATT for $20 a month each. Took some phone calls into support to get it to work but after some escalations in the support chain I have unlimited 4g data. Total bill is around $50 a month.

* Still room to add more sim cards and more antennas. It honestly works great though, get 20-150 mbps basically everywhere.

Photo of my antenna and cradlepoint router/modem: https://imgur.com/a/MOdJkT8

Nice, thanks for sharing. Since you mentioned SSH - make sure you use MOSH. If using an iPad https://blink.sh/ is an absolute gem.

That sounds really similar to the setup I made for my parent's RV. Cradlepoint devices are really fantastic for what they do. If you set it up correctly, you can also use it to bridge WiFi, so all the devices internally only ever connect to the WiFi from the Cradlepoint and when you can you can park near a public WiFi hotspot and bridge it. This can often be faster or more reliable than 4G, depending on your location, or in their case if you pay for RV park premium WiFi.

We found that Verizon had very good coverage of 4G/LTE, especially in areas that were unlikely to be covered by other providers. AT&T was a good backup. T-Mobile was not, even though it was cheaper, coverage off the Interstate or in sparser populated areas was pretty bad. We also found how much throughput was needed to handle my dad's work remotely and set an upward limit on throughput on the Cradlepoint so we would overwhelm any WiFi networks we used as a courtesy to others, which ended up being around 10Mbps. Honestly, if you could just get 10Mbps nationwide without interruption, I think it would make a huge difference in the possibilities of remote work and rural technology.

Love the photos, we also used the IBR1700. I set it up with NetCloud though with an active license from Cradlepoint (and bought new) so I could help my parents remotely administrate it while they were traveling.

Have you tried satellite internet with the rooftop dishes that have electronically controlled seeking / adjustments? It was another thing we considered but hadn't done yet, but once Starlink becomes more widely available would be worth a consideration.

Yes exactly! The wifi bridge mode of the Cradlepoint is super interesting. One major drawback I've found in practice is that if the campground/public wifi network has a splash page, I basically can't get it to work. It takes some serious troubleshooting to get setup even when everything should be straightforward and obvious sometimes too. Cannot beat the few instances where I got massive bandwidth off of a terrible wifi connection though. No wonder the campground wifis always seem to be terrible with direct connect normal devices :)

I've been rather lazy the last 6 months and don't even bother with wifi bridging and just rely on Verizon as primary and ATT as backup.

Good call on managing their setup via NetCloud, it is rather nifty. My license expired a few months ago and I can no longer edit any of the settings so it's just locked in on cruise control with the last settings I had saved.

Haven't tried any satellite link options, 4g has been too cheap and decent for me to explore other options personally. I am on the waitlist for Starlink but from what I have researched, the current box is extremely power hungry (even if you get around the coverage limitations that apparently will be lifted soon). At a campsite I could see that being a great option though. In the next 5-10 years I think we could see some serious improvements on satellite

> The wifi bridge mode of the Cradlepoint is super interesting. One major drawback I've found in practice is that if the campground/public wifi network has a splash page, I basically can't get it to work. It takes some serious troubleshooting to get setup even when everything should be straightforward and obvious sometimes too.

Yes, we've encountered issues with this too. It's really variable. Some public WiFi with a captive portal everything works fine because it does the redirects in a way more similar to a NAC, so any device connected to WiFi on the Cradlepoint once it's bridged can just go to something like http://neverssl.com/ and it gets redirected successfully. But a lot of the devices have improperly configured captive portals that rely on local IPs, which of course are in a different network segment than the client device due to the Cradlepoint having a router between the two network segments. In this case, I've been able to sometimes make it work because usually the badly configured portals are using low-grade consumer devices which don't have advanced NAC capabilities, it's usually just a captive portal via HTTP redirection to the router's IP and whitelists the device MAC address.

In these cases two things are sometimes true (usually one or the other, not both):

1. MAC address to be whitelisted is a URL parameter

2. MAC address to be whitelisted is part of the the form content of the page that gets POSTed

In either case, I replace the MAC address with the MAC address of the WiFi radio on the Cradlepoint we use for bridging, and it whitelists and works.

There have been some cases where it's so broken it's been impossible to troubleshoot. Many times it's been my dad on Facetime over LTE trying to get it to work with my instructions remotely, or me relying on LTE on the Cradlepoint to configure via the Net Cloud. Either way, I wish everybody used proper NAC for their captive portals or just did away with captive portals. They're really annoying, and are fundamentally based on violating protocol expectations of standardized protocols, they break down in non-obvious ways, and are generally problematic for legitimate users and do little to stop a motivated illegitimate user.

is there some kind of router that can combine connections to increase total bandwidth?

Yes, there are actually quite a few. In general this is called "carrier aggregation" although this is a generic term and there are many ways in which this is done. I find it more simple to think of this as an analogy, two (or many) internet links are represented by two lines of people trying to enter a doorway. The router software acts as a coordinator for the lines. One method says, take one person from the Verizon line, one from the ATT line (round robin). Another method says, check how fast people move in the lines and prioritize the line that moves faster. There are other ways, some even take into account the type of traffic that you are performing and prioritize differently, some use the secondary links as backups when the primary actually fail (I suppose this is more failover than carrier aggregation).

I believe for Cradlepoint routers, you need a router that has two modems like the one I mention above. There are other brands though, I believe Peplink makes a mobile router that supports carrier aggregation as well. I worked for a company called VeloCloud that designed an SDWAN router that did a complex version of this for businesses but they don't make a mobile router. They did some cool stuff like Dynamic Multi Path Optimization where at the packet level, they could do some proprietary routing and achieve some pretty amazing improvements with packet loss, jitter, and ISP rate limiting.

I’ve looked extensively at Peplink devices. They aren’t exactly crystal clear as to which devices actually support SpeedFusion and which ones don’t. And they have multiple additional features which are not supported on all devices that do actually support the baseline SpeedFusion product.

They’re also not very transparent on how you can buy the bigger devices that have like six or eight interfaces. You can buy a Balance 30 device on Amazon for $1k, but that’s a low-end device for them and only supports two Ethernet interfaces plus one optional USB interface. If you want anything more, you have to go through a licensed dealer, all of whom have “contact us for consulting and pricing” rates.

They’re also limited to 200Mbps on their SpeedFusion Cloud service. If you want more than that, you need to get their custom software image to run it on your own hardware or VM somewhere, or you pay them for a dedicated host in their cloud.

I haven’t looked at any of the other main hardware vendors in the SD-WAN space. I haven’t been able to find out as much information about them.

Totally agree on lack of transparency, really of all the options right now. I think most of these companies sell in enterprise large quantities so when it comes to consumers they just don’t have a means to provide info, support, etc. When I bought my cradlepoint the software license expired and when I called in, they said someone else owned it. It took a lot of back and forth to figure out how to change ownership and to extend the license. We are definitely operating on the gray area of consumer products.

One consumer product company that provides carrier aggregation that seems interesting is Mofi. I almost went with them but didn’t so I don’t have any info other than what’s in their marketing material but worth some research:

https://mofinetwork.com/product/mofi5500-5gxelte-em7411-dual...

They have quite a few models

To do so for single, large transfers it would require a system somewhere upstream to perform the download for you and split it between your ISPs. If the connections were in parallel, it's easier.

There is MPTCP - Multi-Path TCP. I do not have experience with it though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multipath_TCP

i've been living in a rural area for years and suffering from poor internet. how in the world did you get unlimited 4g data for only $20? The mobile hotspot plans are all capped?

* Verizon: I have a standard unlimited family plan with 6 lines. Each additional line is a $20 connection fee. The rest is around $200 but that's static based upon the amount of lines you add. In practice it became a little more complicated. First convincing them to add an IMEI of a Cradlepoint modem/router to a standard cell plan. I initially just tried to plug in the SIM card but I got a notification through email that the device had changed and it wasn't supported. One call to support and the person on the phone said they don't support Cradlepoint. Second call to support and they said they would have to escalate. They sent me to a higher up in support that agreed to add the IMEI. Initially it didn't work but he did some troubleshooting with me on the phone and got it working. Then onto the data caps... Verizon has something like 10gb of unthrottled tethered data and unthrottled data otherwise. I won't post it here but there are technical ways of hiding the router traffic to make Verizon think that you are not tethering (hint, they use network hop counts, ttl).

* ATT: was much easier, I literally plugged in the sim card and it worked immediately. I'm using my company cell phone sim card but I believe they have similar family plans priced to that of Verizon. It's a little slower most places but totally different coverage map compared to Verizon so a nice combination. They aren't doing any throttling for me... but I usually don't use more than 50gb

This is a pretty impressive setup. Recently I lived in an RV for a year and my setup was much more janky than this...

Basically consisted of a gl.inet router that I plugged in a old Moto X4. This allowed me to get wifi from whichever campsite we stayed at (always garbage) and then I would pay for 100GB from Cricket and T-Mobile. I would swap sims when I would run out of data about half way through the month.

Then I discovered I could get unlimited data on Cricket with a regular phone plan if I changed the TTL on the router. Ended up being the most stable option for the last few months.

that’s quite interesting, do you mind elaborating on your last sentence? How does that work?

With some carriers, it can bypass tethering quotas, appearing as if usage is originating from the "phone".

I setup a firewall rule in openwrt that said anything coming over USB needed to set the TTL to 65 so it looked like the data was coming from the phone itself and not from the tether.

IIRC, on the plan I was using on Cricket, I would get unlimited data + 15GB of tether. This just byapssed that limit.

I think they can almost figure it out because if I tried to tether without the TTL trick, data wouldn't work. So I'm guessing it still counted the data I was using against some kind of cap?

On Android, there are apps that you can install that do this for you.

I used to use them a lot when I was traveling with my laptop a few years ago and it always worked great.

Years ago, I did this with my jailbroken iphone 3gs. When visiting lots of websites, it would serve up the mobile version, so I assumed that the app was somehow modifying request headers to look like a phone request. I guess not as many sites used TLS back then.

Can you mention some? I've been having an issue with my phone having its hotspot limited to under 1mbps.

I switched to iPhone and can’t even remember the name of the app anymore, sorry

But the good news is that I got it from the Play Store back then and you didn’t even need to jailbreak.

I’ll admit I don’t know much about networking, but what’s special about 65?

That's the TTL that some carriers use from the phone. So once it hits the router it goes down - meaning the carrier knows you're tethering. Setting it to back to 65 on the router makes it harder for the carrier to detect.

Close, but it's a little bit different than how you describe it. The router is connected between the phone and the other devices in this user's scenario. The default TTL on Linux and Android is 64. If you tether, the packet will go through your phone and have its TTL decremented to 63 (the phone is a gateway). Then when it arrives at the cell tower with a lower TTL, they know you're tethering and drop the packet.

If you set it to 65 on your host device or router, it will be decremented to 64 on the phone - and is now hard to distinguish from real traffic from the phone.

I was bit confused while trying to digest the TTL hack up thread, but your explanation completed cleared up my confusion, so thank you for that.

So 65 isn't necessarily the correct value, but whatever the phone's default is?

You want it to be one more than the value the phone uses as its default. Then when the packet arrives at the phone via the tether its TTL is decremented and it is passed out to the tower. Tower sees a packet with a TTL that it is expecting and assumes it is phone data.

Visible is a Verizon subsidiary with unlimited everything for $25/month with “Party Pay” and no contract.

You can tether with it and the only trade off is that you get deprioritized first in crowded environments.

There’s also no store, but I see that as an improvement.

That was the first one I tried, but I was getting data speeds of about .1 Mbps

Interesting - must be regional I guess, I get good speeds where I use it.

Same here, tried it on out last time out with the travel trailer. Canceled the plan after we got back home as it was terrible, and not to speak that we were in areas where it should have run flawless. Ended up using my main phone's connection for some of the work i had to do.

Visible's tethering is limited to 5Mbps (according to their pricing page). Have you been getting more than 5Mbps tethering? Do you do anything to get around tethering speed limits?

Deprioritization can be hard in some areas. Verizon has the most customers and the least spectrum at the moment.

I think I've gotten more than 5mbps (or at least was for a time) - I haven't done anything, but I might be wrong about this (I don't rely on tethering most of the time so haven't noticed).

IIRC a long time ago all of Visible's data speed was capped at 5mbps and that was the 'tradeoff' of the low cost service in addition to deprioritization. They eventually dropped that cap, but it's possible it still exists for tethering.

I will plug Starlink for those that can get it though - not mobile yet, but we went from a crappy calnet connection to a stable 50+ sometimes 150+ mbps connection. When they get it working across cells (which Musk tweeted interest about) it'd be a pretty sweet option for an RV. If you're out in the boonies though and looking for stable home internet, it can't be beat (as long as you have a clear view of the sky).

I lived and worked remotely from a van in Australia for a year... in 2008. It was pretty different back then. We kitted the van out with a solar panel and batteries. There was some 3G service available near roads, and something like CDMA a little more widely. But at times we'd end up driving miles of dirt track to try to find high ground to pick up a signal. My gf would hold the 3G receiver up and look for signal. During one of these treks, trying to turn around on a narrow dirt track way outside of Tenant Creek, the side of the road collapsed like a sand dome under one wheel of the van and we began listing to the side. I had to hold it up with my shoulder so the whole van wouldn't fall over on its side. My gf got out, causing it to tip even more, and started throwing herself against the back of it, while I tried to rock it out of the ditch. It was at this point that I noticed that what I had thought was a tree branch (odd, since there were no trees around), was actually a 4-5 foot long black snake that was moving rather quickly toward us up the road. I guess that gave us the adrenaline burst we needed, because we miraculously heaved the van free and jumped inside just in time. I started it and unceremoniously drove right over the snake.

Another funny story... One night camping off a road, not in a campsite, we heard a ruckus outside the van where we had our table and cooking stuff set up under a tarp. It was pitch black out. We kept a katana under the platform bed for protection. So I opened the rear door and jumped out in my boxers and sandals, holding this sword, and found myself looking at a large kangaroo that was rifling through our cookware. I got back in the van and said, forget it, I'm not fighting that thing... we'll just have to clean it up in the morning.

Doesn't the author know that Starlink is limited to a specific location that the subscription address is at (+/- 25miles)?

https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html

Answered here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593949

They have said those restrictions are part of the beta, and going away soon.

Got a source for that? When I last looked into it, their site said it was a technical limitation and that there were no plans for creating a truly mobile receiver.

As with most things elon it was in a tweet, https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/16/22388378/elon-musk-starli...

Eagle-eyed observers have noticed Starlink antennas on SpaceX's drone ships. So mobile capability is definitely already implemented, it's just not publicly available yet.

(Edit: And evidently some regular users are already beta-testing it too.)

On top of this plethora of technology and various providers, doesn't bonding all links to a single solution provider (Speedify) create a single point of failure?

From https://speedify.com/features/

> What kinds of servers do you have? > We use a combination of dedicated and virtual servers, depending on location and scalability needs. All of our servers have at least 1 Gbps network access and are optimized for bandwidth intensive usage such as live streaming, video conferencing or online gaming.

Let's assume the best case, where Speedify implements this as swarms of redundant servers, so that even if some servers or datacenters are down it may continue to work.

I could not find in the article any mention of disabling Speedify and falling back to using a single provider, or a local bonding solution like described on https://wiki.debian.org/Bonding .

Isn't speedify still a "single point of failure", in the sense that any incident with Speedify (e.g. accounting glitch of any kind) may cause the whole contraption to fall like a house of cards?

The UniFi Dream Machine Pro has a backup WAN link. I plug my backpack nighthawk LTE router into it when it is not in my backpack. If speedify fails, it falls over automatically.

Having a single point of failure here might be OK, if Speedify is so much more reliable than the other solutions (4G wireless in potentially remote areas). Though yeah, I'd like to see an option to failover to a single provider, because it's conceptually so easy to add.

If you're trying to get internet in a van in rural Australia, the chances of Speedify going down are completely insignificant compared to more basic things like not having phone signal.

Yes:

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2020-05-01/rural-residents...

2. https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/05/telstra-sms-over-wifi-lau...

3. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/experts-call-for-rethink-of-c...

Alex from Speedify here. Yes, exactly, we have swarms of redundant servers. The servers are very reliable, but in case of failure, you're on another server in 30 seconds.

Your comment makes me realize we may need more options on what to do when the connection fails. Security-types had us add a "kill switch" to make sure traffic couldn't get out when the encrypted tunnel fails. But if you don't care about that, another option to guarantee it would go right out, would make sense too.

Does Speedify have an open source client?

I'd be interested in paying for the service but not willing to run closed source software locally and then send all my traffic to it.

Use Speedify as the underlay network then run a self-hosted VPN on top (configure in the UniFi Dream Machine Pro). :)

That works, and has been done before. It can be confusing to run Speedify and the VPN client on the same box, but if there's a Speedify router box with the internet, and another box with the VPN client, it should just work.

just from reading the article, it sounds like speedify does a lot of packet inspection to prioritize traffic. Wouldn't a VPN negate that?

Not at this point, sorry.

Hey Alex,

Just wanted to drop in this thread and let you know I think you have an awesome product and I have been happily using speedify for almost a year now. I hope you keep up the great work and are able to keep growing!

Apart from the SPOF, speedify introduces additional latency because you have to bounce through their servers.

Most of the time you can simply route traffic through multiple uplinks without bonding.

It adds a tiny amount of latency, but there are more important factors than latency.

If you are on a Zoom call, tunneling through Speedify in redundant mode will give you the minimum latency of n connections, reduce jitter (latency deviation), and eliminate packet loss.

I've dreamt of redundant/automatic failover connections since mid 90s.

Whatever solution I researched it boiled down to trading bandwith increase for latency increase.

Speedify seems intriguing yet seems extremely country dependant.

Say you are in Sweden and want to access Australian site when Speedify server is in UK your latency is surely to go up.

Since Speedify is essentially a VPN with multiple incoming connections, isn't it extremely important on what country Speedify servers are?

PS Another up/downside your public IP is probably Speedify IP (just like a regular VPN)

I’ve looked at Speedify. In fact, I signed up for service with them on my iPad and iPhone as soon as I heard about their service years ago. It doesn’t really get you any higher speed (at least, not on download), what it gets you is a more robust network connection with failover if the primary goes down, although I do see a speed improvement for upload.

On the software-only router side of the house, Speedify at least let’s you tie your multiple links together and get you a more reliable connection. But true aggregation (like LACP) requires that all links be of exactly the same speed — e.g., you do link aggregation on multiple Ethernet ports that are connected to the same switch, and while no one connection will have bandwidth greater than a single Ethernet port, you will have be able to have multiple connections that can all achieve that same level of speed. Their style of bonding isn’t the same thing.

I’ve also looked at OpenMPTCPRouter. On paper, it looks like a better solution to me than Speedify, but in practice it’s not designed to handle multiple different upstream connections with varying levels of performance. I’ve chatted with the author, who lives in France and his ISP connection is 1.25 gigabits per second, so this hasn’t been a priority. He did say that this was going to be something he was going to start working on soon, however.

So, I might be forced to go with something like a six port Protectli pfSense or OPNSense router plus Speedify, at least until I can get something better.

Oh, and Speedify has (or had, maybe they’ve changed this), an effective speed limit that they also implement. I think it’s about 200 mbps. If you’re getting that speed or better over Wi-Fi or Ethernet or whatever your primary network provider is, then they don’t even bother to bring up the other providers.

So, you’re not going to tie multiple upstream sub-1gbps providers together into one giant network connection, because Speedify will just stop bringing up more channels when it thinks you have enough speed.

At least, that was the Behaviour I saw when I was doing my tests. Maybe I had the wrong type of account, so that they were effectively throttling me down?

Hmm. Okay, I did some more testing tonight, and it looks like they do now have more connection modes, including one optimized for streaming, one optimized for raw speed, and one optimized for reliability.

I was able to get some higher speeds with Speedify than I could get with my naked ISP or with NordVPN, and the graphs showed that the cellular 4G connection was actually a significant bonus on top of my DSL.

So, now I guess I’m going to have to build my own Speedify router combined with OPNSense or pfSense, and get those other upstream network connections also set up.

Running all of that separate network equipment seems particularly power hungry when not plugged into a campsite.

I wonder why the author didn't consider a Peplink router which can handle redundant cellular/wifi connections out of the box. That's how I recreate a setup akin to this while I'm on the road in a single device.

Not to say this isn't awesome as is and I'd love an excuse to install a full Ubiquiti stack in my own camper!

Oh, this _seriously_ chews power. I need to do a blogpost up about the eletrical system that makes it all possible. Leave your digits at https://ghuntley.com/newsletter to be notified when it ships. I looked into teltonika (ie https://teltonika-networks.com/product/rut950/ ) but stopped because the modems are Cat4 (similar story with Microtik).

FYI, Teltonika RUTX14 has CAT12.

Cheers. If anyone at Teltonika wants to send me a RUTX14 I'd love to try it out.

Why did you opt for a UDM-Pro instead of virtualizing the router on exsi? It would save space and power over running another appliance.

Care to give us a sneak peak - say, what your typical power draw is like? :)

I'm particularly interested in this topic because I've been thinking about power a lot after the Texas blackouts (considering building a bike generator so I can have power in case of a disaster like that one).

Have you considered any of the solar “generators”? Basically they incorporate a solar controller, inverter, and battery into one easy to use package. I typically get at least one outage/year here in the Midwest. I bought a kill-a-watt to measure what my fridge is using (about 2kwh/day) and it looks like one of these devices could keep that running through a longer outage. If you want to go even further you can buy more batteries!

You will likely be disappointed in cellular availability during a long blackout. I'm in the Midwest in a metro area of ~200k. We had a major weather event which took out power for 1-2 weeks. Almost all cellular towers went offline as soon as their batteries died. It seemed there were only 1-2 towers in the entire area that had generator backups.

I set up a and will be using StarLink in an RV on the weekends. Pro Tip: go somewhere strange if you want to get into the beta.

It’s surprisingly good.

I don’t think I have any special anecdotes except that I’m getting 85Mpbs up and a 35ms ping to speedtest.net.

Initially the connection wasn’t reliable, but it apparently needs to be set up for a few hours before it “locks in”.

Wow. I am in the middle of a big city and I have 50Mbps down and 11 down and you have that speed in the middle of nowhere... the future sounds amazing.

Tell me about it. My 1Gbps docsis3 has an upload of 35Mpbs because of 1980s cable tv frequency choice reasons. I’m slightly impressed with StarLink and slightly annoyed at my main ISP.

This is on the edge of nowhere, but still cool. The only other option I had here was dialup or if I wanted to pay outrageous rates, I could get a .5-1Mbps T1 only because there is a ranger station not too far off that put one in and I can access some of the trunk hardware a few miles away.

latency will go still down significantly as v2 and v3 join the constellation with laser interlinks. For long connections, they will be theoretically faster than fiber due to geographical constraints on straight lines and routing.

Side notes: The more I thought about it. In case anyone is interested:

- The setup is stupid easy. Place dish outside, plug in. That's about all.

- It's weird having a dish that points straight up, used to them all pointing south (hemisphere dependent of course)

- The router box (thing?) is a bad design. Stupid little triangle that tips over all the time. Seems cheap.

- Shipped with no wifi encryption. I thought that was weird. I bet this changes to for real release.

- Got a few "outside your home area" messages without moving. Errors.

- It is good for streaming or websites, but currently I have it on the ground and it seems like it loses connection fairly often. I'll put in up on a poll now that I know...

- The dish is heated. GOOD. I was worried about this with the amount of snow it's going to get.

I don't really geek out over these things. It's good. It's exactly what it should be I think. We'll see how it lasts the winter. I expect the reception to get better when it's mounted, but it'll be interesting to see how white-out snow effects the performance.

Never knew Speedify was a thing. What a great idea and I’m sure something that is standard in industrial applications or LTE routers.

Makes Multipath TCP actually usable in the real world. Great product that not enough people know about.

I just stumbled onto Speedify a few minutes before I noticed this article surprisingly. I wanted to try it but unfortunately it doesn't take crypto and has no free trial

That's a shame. They used to have a free trial with a data cap which I used intermittently while traveling for years before converting to a paying customer a year ago.

Maybe they looked at their numbers amd couldn't didn't see the free tier paying for itself in conversions, but it did convert me.

We still have the 2GB per month free tier with no registration. It's available everywhere but Linux... unfortunately, without us doing anything really creepy (which we won't do), it was just too common for Linux users to trick us into endlessly starting the 2GB over. I think there was a script for automating it making the rounds on some sites.

Huh, I looked but didn't see anything on your pricing pages about the free tier, just the 30 day free trial.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I guess that's not so clear. Just install, and you start on the free tier.

Does Speedify have any plans to support FreeBSD? It's still used pretty heavily over Linux in the router space.

AFAIK multi-path is not too common, though most people who do multipath are using MPTCP.

Last I checked, It's part of LTE standard, but used exclusively in South Korea. Some providers across the world provide multi-path gateways: in France, OVH has OverTheBox which is line-provider agnostic, Free has ADSL+4G aggregation where fiber isn't available. In Switzerland, Swisscom also has some multi-path offer.

Also, Apple's Siri uses MPTCP. (And developers love the fact that only Siri can use it, and not other apps).

Google/Android said no to MPTCP, saying QUIC/HTTP3 already has the provisions needed to do multipath, but I don't know if Google actually uses it somewhere.

> and not other apps

Looks like there’s been an API for at least a few years. http://blog.multipath-tcp.org/blog/html/2017/07/05/mptcp_exp...

From experience, Free's ADSL+4G aggregation is stupid. The router needs ADSL to be up all the time and aggregation is unpredictable and opaque. Being the carrier for both ADSL and 4G would've enabled them to do multi-path magic and assign the same IP to both endpoints yet they don't. It seems to be basic bonding.

QUIC has some basic features for migrating a session to another link, but it doesn't support multipath in that sense. Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) is a hot research area right now, and it's being standardized.

MPTCP's design was fundamentally incompatible with QUIC's UDP transport and session model.

From what I understand, neither MPTCP nor MPQUIC are designed to share multipath routing via a gateway (e.g. a bunch of devices sharing a multipath aggregation of 3 4G modems). It's all designed for a single device with multiple interfaces.

I was wondering about this exact same thing the other day. Working from home makes my mobile data go wasted every month. I actually have a company phone in addition to a personal one.

SpeedFusion is one alternative

https://estore.peplink.com/categories/speedfusion-cloud/spee...

We use to use Peplink at a company I worked at

If someone at Peplink wants to send me a router; I'd love to try it out. https://ghuntley.com/contact

SD-WAN for consumers? Reviewing the documentation a little it seems like it's installable on a Debian box.

Yup. My bonder virtual machine is running Ubuntu + Speedify.

It's way too expensive tho.

How does the "redundant" mode work? You cannot just double TCP packets as within that protocol it's a sign of congestion, it will drastically reduce the throughput. Does this include VPN-ing through some service that can understand duplicates and clean them up?

Maybe it determines whatever route is faster when talking to a specific host for the first time, or every so often, and then sticks to that route for that specific host?

All the connections are likely being used to talk to the same speedify server. Only once the packets make it to that server do they get forwarded to the destination.

As someone mentioned you can round-robin connections, but then you don't get failover (without interruption, anyway).

What I think most of these solutions do is use MPTCP or a custom homebrew protocol to a server that then holds the actual TCP connection you want. So a slightly more complicated VPN. There is an open source project for this:

https://www.openmptcprouter.com/

OP is using a commercial VPN that does this.

There’s more than one choice in the space.

wich one??

Speedify (it’s in the article…)

Peplink also has their own but it’s geared towards businesses and is pricey.

As someone with a similar setup to the OP, I should mention: OpenMPTCPRouter's networking is completely amateur compared to Speedify. It's a grab bag of half-baked multipath VPN experiments (glorytun over UDP, an outdated MPTCP-based fork of glorytun, and MLVPN), none of which approach the completeness of Spotify's implemention. They generally don't handle changing interface bandwidth, packet reordering, packet aggregation, header compression, mode switching between redundant and aggregation, or any other hard problems here. Hopefully this will save someone the pain of setting these up just to be disappointed.

>Does this include VPN-ing through some service that can understand duplicates and clean them up?

Based on other comments here, I think that's exactly what Speedify is.

Yes, it relies on a gateway server, effectively a VPN. The gateway server deduplicates packets, reorders them, and then forwards.

For the wireless connections listed (Telstra, Opus, and Vodaphone), I do wonder how much of this are on the same physical tower and network. Certain parts of this multi-home connection would be running off the same physical network due to how wireless providers provision out their towers. They will share physical space on a tower and even an underlying fiber run out to the local POP.

This may be a situation of someone being too clever by half.

In Australia - Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone maintain their own independent mobile networks & equipment (Telstra having the most coverage in rural areas).

If the author used 3 MVNOs from the same network, then it'd be silly.

Telstra, Optus, and Vodafone might share the same physical tower though (while using different antennas and RRUs). But that's only an issue if there are severe interference issues there (on all the bands the author is connecting to) or if the tower itself suffers some catastrophic damage.

As long as the bottleneck isn't the fiber coming into the tower, then I don't see the issue. It could easily be that one company's equipment is over provisioned and overloaded while the other is fine.

Does anyone know when starlink is going to be available for RVs or campers? I'd love to bring the internet while I camp around California, but right now there are range restrictions.

I guess the geofencing is for balancing loads. When there's ample bandwidth, coverage and maybe handoff support, they may remove the limitations.

They've submitted a proposal to the FCC, but I haven't heard anything further.

As a boat owner... I'm with you!

It’s in beta now. Set mine up. If it works the way it does now when the masses join you are going to really like it. Anecdotes in another comment here.

Indeed there are range restrictions with Starlink. What I did was order Starlink to the nearest post office to a place that has a unique intersection of lovely camping grounds that doesn't have internet access. The idea is to rotate between them. Use https://sebsebmc.github.io/starlink-coverage/index.html to calculate how big your cell is and then intersect with your camping guide :)

That site has seen no 2021 updates. I suspect it hasn't been updated with new orbits, cell maps or satellites.

Hi, yeah I created that and haven't updated it in a long time. You can pull the github repo and run it yourself to get a new map but there are some issues that have cropped up since that have prevented me from being able to update the site myself.

I guess it's all stars now if updated anyway, so not super interesting.

I did manage to run the simulation in May and surprisingly the data appeared to indicate less stars but higher average coverage time (by a few minutes). I didn't push this update because it wasn't much of a change from the current map, but I probably should have since that is interesting in itself.

I will note that the cells that I have rendering on the site there are for performance and download size reasons, and were never meant to correspond to any geographical restrictions that Starlink has put in place.

The power usage of a Starlink station is 90W. Seems not feasible for an RV unless at a campsite with electricity?

If you setup your eletrical system correctly then 90w at 240v is nothing. Answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28594552

Unless you have huge batteries, 90w constant draw is 2.1kW a day.

With all that other hardware, you'd have to be essentially tethered to the grid, or be recharging your batteries from grid regularly. (looks like you have 6x100 watt solar panels which won't do much for that kind of consumption)

They have been sending out surveys recently, seems like they are working out pricing and mounts for RVs.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/prgrbb/starlink_r...

Yo, SpaceX/Starlink employees. Hook me _up_ please

Impressive setup. As someone who has lived in a van for a little bit, I'd be terrified of that van getting stolen or even just equipment getting stolen off the roof, especially in cities. I wouldn't want to leave the van much.

Theft is indeed a concern. It's not something I talk publically about but if you look closely at the header image you'll see some clues about one of the mitigations. Footage is backed up offsite.

While I'm waiting in queue for my starlink since last year, I went and got a mofi with directional antennas and a 12 foot pool. Its not fast at the rural cabin, but I can stream 480p yt, and ssh. And its always on.

I have a grandfathered unlimited wireless account, so I just ordered a another sim card. The mofi changes the network settings so data looks like a phone not a tethered device.

I bought a 4g router, they have 5G but its 2x the cost, but seems to cover all the bands, and does channel aggregation.

https://mofinetwork.com/

Interesting that he places Starlink above the 5G link in "network priority".

I would think that 5G would usually offer better speeds and ping times than Starlink in areas where it's available.

Starlink would be used when camping; 5G doesn't work in scenarios like [1] this and is only useful when hanging around cities as the range of 5G is very poor.

[1] https://ghuntley.com/content/images/size/w1600/2021/02/Photo...

The point of the priority system is that it isn't based on what you're doing ("camping") but instead on the actual network conditions.

If Starlink is ranked above 5G, then it'll never fall back to 5G. 5G should be ranked above Starlink, and then when camping and there's no 5G it doesn't matter the ranking.

Starlink is still geofenced to 25 miles IIRC, so his setup should fall back to other options when he leaves that area. I'm still not sure if it makes sense to rank starlink above 5G, though.

If Starlink gets their lasers working, it may be better than 5G in some areas, since it depends on the backhaul.

Would it be possible to achieve something like Speedify yourself by routing traffic from your multiple interfaces to/from a VPS using Linux?

Yes, it's very possible.

Also you can simply use multiple uplinks without VPS and it provides better latency. The drawback is that you can't failover/balance protocols that use only one connection. Mosh and browsing work well tho.

I have been using the following for the last six (6) months in the USA and it has been "just okay":

  - Pepwave Max Transit Duo Cat12
  - Poynting 7 in 1 Omnidirectional Antenna

Allows two active cellular connections, but has four (4) sim slots (2 are reserved for hot standby). I have them filled with 2 T-Mobile (100GB/month plan), 1 ATT (50GB/month plan), and 1 Verizon (50GB/month plan).

Along side that, I have a T-Mobile Inseego 5G M2000 Hotspot with a 100GB/month plan). This sometimes gets better performance than the externally mounted antenna and Pepwave Cellular connections. The pep wave does allow the use of Wireless-WAN, so I connect to the hotspot from the Pepwave's WWAN and can then have three active bonded connections.

This is being used in a travel trailer as I tour the country with my family. The result is just okay meaning it doesn't blow me away, but it does work. Everywhere I have been so far, I have been able to get connected, largely without doing a thing, and get to work.

Tip: blurring photos of sensitive information is a bad idea:

https://dheera.net/posts/20140725-why-you-should-never-use-p...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8078747

Answered at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28594133

OK, i get what he's doing and it's cool, however i then stumbled over this:

> Yes, this setup is overkill but having functioning internet is especially important when going camping with young kids.

No, it's not. 100% no.

It is for my family. It may not be for yours. When they reach the age where they have their own cellphones / social media media then it's different. Freshly popped popcorn from the microwave + salt + butter and introducing kiddos to "the dish" movie after _they have been to the actual dish_ is A+ and highly recommend.

You don't internet for that. The movie is available on DVD as well as Blu-Ray.

Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28593998

The more modern answer would be to download ahead of time.

That assumes I'm departing from a house? This is my house.

Yes, meant to add that if folks are misunderstanding, perhaps you could clarify. (But I was not yet awake.)

From the text however, its not clear how often the kids are around. Maybe they could benefit from some downtime, maybe not. Maybe it is their link to school and would therefore be even... crucial. In absence of info people tend to speculate. ;-)

Also, I have a stash of important movies that I keep for posterity. Even at a normal home with reliable internet. I don't want to pay for rental every single time, or have them go off streaming at random as they so often do. You'd be surprised what can fit on an SD card or micro usb flash these days.

> its not clear how often the kids are around

Deliberately so, this information is private and personal. Especially right now due to lockdowns in Australia. I have publically shared this recently because enough is enough:

https://twitter.com/GeoffreyHuntley/status/14335483401221857...

Sorry, not trying to pierce your privacy, it was merely a factor on the discussion. Also, I don't use twitter for various reasons, so couldn't read the blurb there.

How much dvd storage do you have in a van?

Enough to take one DVD with you plus a USB based drive. It's not that much space. And depending on your jurisdiction, it might even be legal to rip a DVD and take the ripped version with you for the trip on say a tablet's flash storage. No need for the internet.

But why bother? Its easier to bring some internet.

I don't have young kids myself, but I feel like if you are camping for long enough(like if you live in a van), it becomes less of a "escape the modern comforts to reset" kind of deal, and you'll want to start blending in modern parts of life.

BINGO.

Maybe for a weekend trip or just an overnight camping trip sure. But when your life is living in the camper you need internet.

Young kids get over poor or no internet, but it’s not instantaneous. It’s part of that whole actually being a child thing rather than simply childish behavior.

Can confirm. At 8pm every evening a cron job adds a few firewall rules that block a few devices in the house. Much better than arguing w/ the little one about stopping what they were doing and getting ready for bed.

OP lives in Australia. Which means that functioning telecommunication is an absolute must given the number of living lethal things that are out to kill you.

For what it's worth it's interesting (but possibly explained by the ridiculous cost of anything not SpaceX) OP doesn't have a satellite internet uplink too.

Nothing is out to kill you. It might do it by accident, or if you startle it by trying to use a toilet or wear your shoes, but there’s no malice in it.

[straya] The van has a toilet so toilet spiders don't kill me or the kids https://ghuntley.com/toilets

That's just what we Australians like you to think. Drop bears are actually not very common.

I’ve only ever seen a couple. And only one serious injury but they were silly enough to camp beneath a nest

Fixed: Having NO internet is especially important when going camping with young kids.

My "camping" is "your living" but in nature instead of being a slave to a circa $912,382 home loan in Sydney, Australia. When I want to go "your camping" I house-sit or stay at friends houses.

https://ghuntley.com/how-long/

"This post is for newsletter subscribers only"

Indeed

> indeed (and it's worth it)

thanks for the spam

Yikes. I was with you until this comment. It may be worth it but you're not likely to get a lot of support with that level of... hutzpah.

On my reading I thought - no need to justify this obviously cool project! I think sometimes people feel the need to have a good reason to do something, even when they are doing it because it's just intrinsically awesome. I've totally overengineered my home network, and have spent more than I probably should have, but I don't think it's a waste at all because there is something deeply satisfying about it. But when I defend my purchases to others I am tempted to say, "I need good internet for work", or "we run many IoT devices" and those things are true, but could have been completed with much less time, money and effort.

It's a learning experience, and a hobby. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with finding joy in that, and absolutely no reason to have to explain it to others, because you're likely the only person who gets it.

For sure. We doing a camping family reunion every year at a site with no service and it's great. Camping for me is about particular and very useful kind of giving up. We've done things at that reunion together that never would have happened if kids (or adults) could wander off with their devices. E.g., one year I brought many cheap copies of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and over two nights we did a firelight readthrough. Many of the kids were suspicious at first and then really got into it.

I remember when HN used to discuss cool technology hacks and not incessant hand-wringing about the plague of internet-connected children at campgrounds or the deluge of fraudulent handwriting in the postal system.

I mean, as a technology minded forum, isn’t it also the place to discuss the downsides of tech as well?

I would then argue that it's that very "stick our heads in the sand and pretend nothing's wrong" attitude that contributed to the massive user-hostile mess that tech, broadly, has become.

Well, I think he's mostly doing that, because he is actually working remotely, while camping:

> If you are going to work remotely anywhere in Australia from a van, you need damn good internet.

In that context it may not be an overkill. If you're 2-3 days away from nearest wifi enabled spot, then having a solid backup strategy might be a good idea...

Yea, I just thought "wat"?

In the USA, Starlink requires registration against a particular set of satellites visible to a fixed/bounded area - you can’t just take the modem and satellite with you and move to another location (and especially not use them while moving continuously). Is that not the case in Australia?

This seems a bit inaccurately stated.

The registration is tied a a particular geographic cell over which a large number of different satellites will pass.

Starlink has added the ability to change your address if the cell of your new address has available capacity. You do need some sort of internet access to submit that address change.

IIRC, you have to call them and they stress that it’s not something that they will support doing multiple times in series. It’s for moving to a new address, not working as a nomad.

When Windows NT released ISDN bonding it seemed magical.

It was short lived magic as DSL came along. lol

I had no idea bonding was still a thing.

I did actually prototype multi-link PPP over multiple GRE tunnels as a way of bonding multiple links, with (some level of) redundancy, with the intention of offering that as a product at the ISP I worked. The idea was, basically "up to four ADSL links, possibly from multiple providers, each used as a member of the MPPP bundle, then dial-up of some sort as last resort".

Also tested ADSL as a bond/fallback for a leased line, around then. Ah, the days...

I remember channel bonding from my ISDN times and it made sense since both channels led to the same ISP over the same ISDN card/phone line.

How does channel bonding work across multiple ISPs/NICs?

Edit: This seem to be it: https://speedify.com/blog/featured/speedify-protocol-mptcp-d...

"The way Speedify used to work is it opened one TCP socket over each Internet connection it used - e.g. one TCP socket over Wi-Fi / cellular / wired Ethernet / etc. With the new protocol, Speedify opens up multiple sockets over each connection (for example 8) - 8 over Wi-Fi / cellular / wired Ethernet / etc."

That seems a bit wasteful towards the server destinations.

The 8 sockets are opened only towards speedify "VPN" server. Once you're out of speedify network, you only have one standard TCP connection, so destination server only sees one connection as expected.

Thanks for the clarification, I didn't know that Speedify also tunnels every packet through their servers first but it makes now sense to me.

Can this setup migrate a video call from one link to another without a lost frame or glitch?

So far, nearly every redundant link I've found seems to lead to bugs and glitches all round when failover actually happens.

Alex from Speedify here. Yes, we make a multi-path VPN tunnel, so that calls can be shifted from one link to another without glitches (apps see the same IP address the whole time). To make this work, we do some smart things like retransmit packets that were just sent on the failed link, on the still-working link since they were likely to have been lost.

I can attest that Speedify in redundant mode will handle a link failure in the middle of a Zoom call without a single lost packet or other impact. This isn't failover, though, this is redundancy; it's like having a 1 disk fail in a RAID1.

(I have a similar setup to the OP, but using an array of M.2 4G/5G modem cards connected to external antennas.)

I have tried Speedify (not with such an impressive setup) on multiple 4g connections (different towers, different providers) and didn't see much, or indeed any, throughput bump. So I sort of gave up, because ~20mbps is surprisingly livable-with. I would definitely be interested in trying again, especially with a starlink + 4g + crap-uk-rural-adsl.

I did also once have to manage one of those Mushroom bonding things and....never again, please.

My use case was multiplexing poor wifi in central american hostels with poor cellular data to get a single stable connection. I never tried to get faster speeds but only to improve connection stability by reducing packet loss.

did it work well for you?

It did, I was able to get sufficiently stable connections to do work calls when neither connection was reliable enough alone.

You may see a material improvement in wifi usability if you can figure out a way to use an Intel or Qualcomm wifi chipset over the Alfa, aka Realtek chipset. You probably need an M.2 slot somewhere though.

Not every wifi radio is made the same. In particular, they seem to cope with the ambiguity of received packet collisions differently, and Realtek and Mediatek receivers don't do as well.

Are there any solutions for dealing with xfinity hotspots which are in range to join, but may not have internet access?

I'd like to leverage the open access (as a Comcast subscriber), but I stopped auto joining the networks as sometimes with 2-3 bars of signal, there is no internet.

I already have a Pi connected to 5G phone and it would be great to be able to utilitize the hotspot as well.

Actually Speedify on your phone is pretty good for that. If the hotspot doesn't work, it fails over to the LTE automatically so the bad hotspots never knock you offline.

OT/meta, but I love those handwritten style diagrams. If the author notices this, I'd be interested to know how he made them.

I think they've been made with https://excalidraw.com

They are indeed.

https://excalidraw.com/#json=4810888066367488,n9qcxzAN-ynr7k...

You’d probably like the style of the diagrams created by Julia Evans, then: https://jvns.ca/

I’ve followed her blog for years at this point mostly because I enjoy her diagrams and pretty much always learn something from the way she presents information.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good data plans to be used throughout the EU? In my country I can get unlimited 5G for a pretty good price (€25/mo), but if I go to another country the datacap is only 15GB. I guess pre-pay is an option, but having to get a new SIM in every country sounds like a lot of hassle.

Kind of off-topic, but I really don’t like the use of “handwritten” fonts (as popularized by XKCD where it does work) for technical drawings. It’s hard to read without zooming in (especially on mobile) and it takes longer to grok for things that your brain can’t just deduce (eg technical terms, model numbers, random devices, etc) the way it can with natural text.

I think the main issue is that they're not handwritten. Handwriting isn't just about having uneven shapes of the letters; it's about the kerning, and the spacing, and the layout, that all helps make it clear despite the uneven shapes of the letters.

Speedify is very intriguing. Does anybody know of an open-source alternative?

This is what you’re looking for- https://www.openmptcprouter.com/

What is their carbon footprint? What % of the energy consumed (for Internet but also driving) comes from the solar panel vs ICE? It's nice to live in the nature, but is it ruining it?

It's all solar.

Sure enough for the power consumption of the modems, but I don't think the 5G networks are solar powered in Australia. Using multiple networks at the same time will use more power than using only one.

Does a 5G/4G tower consume more energy when one extra device is connected to it (for redundancy), but not actually transferring data? The answer might be yes, but it'd be very marginal.

How much WP you got on there? edit: just read you got 3*350wp While that is plenty for your computer and routing, do you have any other electrical devices on board? You have a tour of the vans inside?

Tour of the final kitout is coming; leave your digits at https://ghuntley.com/newsletter

Fridge, Freezer, Electric Blanket, Electric Hotwater, 12v Oven, Microwave, Instapot, Telephony Kit (blog post), Gaming Computer and Xbox.

Couldn't help but notice the link to the author's Twitch account, which has the description "I live a minimalist lifestyle..."

Amazing what passes for a minimalist lifestyle these days!

I have a single bowl, fork and knife. Everything that I own has a purpose or it gets chucked. There really isn't much space in a 7m long van.

Given the size of cutlery, coupled with the fact that multiple bowls will fit inside eachother, is this overcompensation for an extreme maximalist lifestyle on the electronics side?

Physical misanthropy FTW

Well there's nothing necessarily wrong with maximalism per se, it's just the misrepresenting was a bit odd

> I have a single bowl, fork and knife.

And soon 7 (!!!) internet links! Anyway, I just find it interesting how individuals (including myself) describe themselves and rationalize their descriptions.

That's cognitive dissonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

It's normal to a point :)

"Dad, can I use the bowl today?"

This definitely sounds like a rough experience for the kids, practically and socially.

No offence, sir, but 6 different ways to connect to the internet is not minimalist.

Your priorities lies elsewhere, perhaps not in bowls, forks and knives, but certainly with internet connectivity :)

I disagree.

It sounds like OP has found that six different ways to connect to the Internet is the minimum that is viable for him, and that meeting that is important enough to justify spending a large portion of his limited budget (both financially and in terms of space in/on his vehicle).

If one fork does the job, one fork is enough. If five way to connect aren’t enough, then maybe six will be enough :)

I disagree. The highly specialized monitoring equipment and dual high gains antennas and the plethora of other bits and pieces are NOT required to run a "a meeting" or a "netflix stream". A phone with a sim card usually suffice. All this frivolous spending points out that this is a hobby. Nothing wrong with having hobbies, of course, but the spending is not compatible with the definition of minimalism.

A minimalist online meeting is an IRC connection over 3G.

You're underestimating how terrible internet connectivity is in rural Australia. A lot of places will only have 1 provider that offers service, if any at all.

Pfft. Mahavira didn't even have clothes.

Admittedly a low-effort post, and too late to delete, but just to explain, this whole idea of having a single bowl (used to collect alms) is a thing in monastic/ascetic traditions. Which I always get the sense minimalism is vaguely inspired by. Anyway, whatever, it was off-topic.

Basic utilities like water, internet, and electricity are what I would consider minimal.

They're just much more involved to get in a Van.

It has been my dream for decades to do exactly this on a sailboat at sea. With providers like Starlink it might be finally getting close to time to pull the trigger.

Are you going to be working when at sea?? That’s not easy.

I work when anchored. Just use my phone hotspot. And a couple of SIM cards.

That Nokia 5G router looks great. I'd like to replace my Huawei router with it but it seems they cannot be bought easily; 'Contact Sales'... why???

T-Mobile US is using it for their home internet service. With the global supply chain and chips issues, it's been hard for T-Mobile to get enough of them. It seems likely that at this point Nokia might just be doing enterprise sales because of this. If you can't produce enough of them for a customer like T-Mobile US, why would you try selling one to a single end-user? T-Mobile US won't require support, won't be doing returns because they don't like it, won't need an individual shipment, etc. Given that T-Mobile US can't get the supply of these that they need, I'd guess that Nokia is making as many as they can for corporate customers and they don't want to deal with individuals at the moment.

https://www.nokia.com/networks/products/fastmile-5g-gateways...

In fact, their website indicates that they're customizing the device with differing specs for different customers with options like an LCD touchscreen and differing antenna designs.

I'm interested in which NUC has 8 Ethernet ports.

Aliexpress is the place to start your quest. Look for "pfsense routers".

At these throughput levels, you can also use a separate USB3 NICs for each port without any issues.

I live on a boat in Australia. Just use my phone hotspot. Only a few places along the coast where I anchor have bad network. I just move.

Pretty interesting setup!

What is the added benefit of having 3 different 4G connections? My understanding is that most of these networks would overlap.

Seems like it's win-win; if coverage overlaps then the connections are bonded and you get 3* 4G lines, and if you only have coverage on some of the networks that's still a usable connection.

Those specific three have their own dedicated spectrum and don't overlap in Australia. There are many other MVNOs there that just resell that spectrum under a different brand name with sometimes better deals, but those three are the "upstream".

You choose 3 separate providers so that they don't have overlapping spectrum.

I've used 2 modems on the same provider, but with each modem locked to a different LTE band. This way, if the provider has one nearby tower on band 1 and another tower on band 2, you can use both of them.

(Note: If you're going to do this, make sure that you understand LTE carrier aggregation and have confirmed that the 2 bands are not being offered as a CA combination.)

> In the future, I intend to sell internet access via the UniFi Captive Portal

I'm pretty sure Telstra, Optus, Vodafone disallow reselling.

Geoff, how do you handle washing your car, especially when you get the Starlink dish on it?

I have a collapsable ladder which is used to clean the panels. There is absolutely no space on the roof left for Dishy and mounting it up there would cast shadows on the solar system (which is circa 3 * 350w house solar panels). For dishy, it's going to be a matter of running a ethernet cable out the van during the day.

https://i.imgur.com/WeKOofK.jpg

A bit of overkill ???.

I have backup LTE dongle if my fibre conks out but it happened a few times last year - we had 2 hourly power cuts so the CPE device would send a DHCP request when it rebooted.

The local POP DHCP server then got flooded with DHCP requests so no connectivity but it was addressed by the provider - also added a battery to CPE as well.

The article is about living out of a camper van, where fiber isn't an option.

I lived and worked remotely out of an RV in 2012. There's really no such thing as overkill when you can't have a hardline internet connection but need internet to do your job. Though Starlink may change that.

When I was doing it, I had a T-Mobile unlimited cell plan, a Verizon hotspot, and I'd go into town to find wifi. It still wasn't enough to feel like I could count on internet being there.

While travelling, it's easy to not have quality cell signal (or any signal). "Unlimited" plans never mean "you're allowed to push 90GB/mo through this". Public wifi is hard to track down, has highly variable quality, and you're always working in Starbucks instead of at your desk with your equipment. If you have to stay at an RV park, the costs are astronomical enough that you save money by parking out of town, where the cell signal is worse. Satellite offerings are extremely expensive (pre-Starlink, at least), and don't work if you can't get clear line-of-sight to the satellite.

If I'd been making more money at the time, I absolutely would have invested more in my internet access. And it sounds like today this stuff has more-numerous and better-documented solutions than when I was doing it.

It was easily worth the trouble to live that way for a while.

Point taken.

This is inspiring. As a Van life person myself without much money.

Any guidance you could give on the most bang for your buck way to get internet?

Just a hotspot?

Go for the backpack route (in the blogpost). Speedify + iPad (or Phone) with LTE + Hotspot.

Awesome!

Did not know about the Nighthawks!

Those are frickin sweet!

Thanks.

I would recommend EasyTether on an Android phone. It bypasses hotspot specific data limits.

I use a Pi running Easytether connected to a 5G phone, with a travel wifi router connected to the Pi over ethernet. Runs my off-grid internet + security cameras.

The most powerful magic number.

This is cool

Geoff: some of the photographs have blur spots to conceal something you don't want to be public. Just an FYI that malicious attackers could bypass this blur in some cases by starting with a generated version of the 'before' content and blurring it and iterating different inputs until it matches your blurred photo. This matters for things like a document with an account number or some other secret. It may not matter much for your network adapters (mac addresses, maybe?). Just a heads up.

Thanks wyldfire; the photos that are blurred are the identifiers of my RIPE atlas nodes. It's not a big issue if they become public knowledge. Fully aware of attack vectors related to image bluring.

would adding a black stripe over instead be better?

I think so. If you don’t like the way that looks aesthetically, I’ve overlaid the text with a white background and more text and blurred that, so you get the same blurred effect but you’re blurring nothing important.

Yes, making sure that the file format you picked doesn't support layers (or at least that those layers are flattened) that mistake bit the New York Times a while ago.

Oh I always thought the attack vector was reverse engineering the blur algorithm, interesting that there’s another method.

You can't reverse a typical blur algorithmically, since it destroys information. You can only guess at the information that was there before the blur, and work from there.

The stronger the blur intensity, the amount of possible starting states to get to that blur increases exponentially. If you blur enough, every pixel is the same color, which obviously has destroyed all information.

But if I know that the blurred content is a social security code written in 12pt Times New Roman - I can perform a blur operation on a million SSNs, and see which one matches most closely to the mess I have on the screen. It's easier with bar codes.

> If you blur enough, every pixel is the same color, which obviously has destroyed all information.

Not true. The ASCII art people have sorted characters by their “shade”; if you know the foreground and background colour of a letter, and you know the single colour of pixel it blurs to, you can still work out what the letter was.

Blurring discards some information and obfuscates other information, but really, given how easy it is to reverse-engineer such things, we should measure the number of bits of information remaining.

If information in image + information about image > bits of information in sensitive data, then in theory you can recover the data.

So simply deleting the data from the image (e.g. blacking it out, removing reflections) is preferable. Saves you a lot of effort!

> if you know the foreground and background colour of a letter, and you know the single colour of pixel it blurs to, you can still work out what the letter was.

Totally agreed, and I like what you said about information remaining - you start to get into fun information theory stuff.

For example, let's say you're given one of the 'shades' you mentioned. I give you #a9a9a9. There's 32 bits of information there. However, if it's a blurred letter of black text on white background, it's always going to be grayscale. There's only 256 possible grayscale values - only 8 bits. Luckily, since there's only 26 lowercase english characters, we can easily fit that into our 255 values. Information is not destroyed! This is the shade->char map you were talking about.

But now what if we blur enough to turn two letters into one shade. That one shade will still be between 0 and 255. But now there's 26*26=676 possibilities that could've created that shade. More inputs than we have outputs for. There's no way to fit more than 256 possible inputs into 8 bits of information. Shade '98' could be 3 or 4 different inputs. However, we can be very clever...

We know that the letter 'u' comes after 'q' almost always. We know that 'x' never appears next to 'j'. We know lots of things, and can supplement the destroyed information, with outside information. We can actually change the whole context for this conversation now. We're not talking about blurring. We're talking about fitting english text into less bits than ought to be possible. We're talking about compression. This is exactly what compression algorithms for english text will do. There's a lot of redundant information in plaintext, just like there's a lot of redundant information in our images of text. An 8x8 pixel character glyph can easily reduce the information to a single pixel. However, there are limits. You can compress english text by 10x, if it's simple enough. You can't compress War and Peace into 5 bytes. You can blur text a few pixels and not destroy information. But you can't blur a paragraph of 12px font by 500px and get your original information.

In my head, blurring is a “visual hash”.

It’s difficult or impossible to derive the original information from the output, but if you have a small enough keyspace you can generate all of the blurred (“hashed”) versions and compare the results.

To some degree, yes, but that metaphor breaks down because (often/typically) hash functions are designed so that small changes to the input result in large changes to the output.

Is there a standard “good enough” alternative solution?

black boxes

Anything opaque would work. But aesthetically that's not always preferable. Maybe an opaque central region with blended borders would be a good balance.

I black out all sensitive regions in magenta, blur any bits I suspect might have reflections (blacking them out if I can see that there's actually something there), then copy from elsewhere in the image to get the aesthetics right, then blur to hide the fact I copied stuff.

The title is confusing if you think of hyperlinks first.

hah indeed it is :/

I try to avoid cynicism in comments, but here it's tough. Tech bros bringing work out to campsites is shite.

He lives in the van, he's not just holidaying...

I believe OP's gripe is precisely this. Most people go to the wilderness to escape technology/work. There is a reason why we don't run fiber optic lines and electricity to every park and it isn't because of cost.

https://ghuntley.com/a-new-chapter/

I can't read the post, but it seems the author seeks to work from forests . Also doubtful the appeal of living in a van is working from a city.

It's not difficult to have a minimalist lifestyle from an apartment in the city. I sense the author felt a void in their life and decided to experiment w/ a van. And odds on favor is it will be temporary as it is not addressing the root cause.

More insights at https://ghuntley.com/how-long/

Does your enjoyment of the campsite require everyone to be enjoying it the same way you are?

Why do you care if some person is coding away while your walk by their campsite?

It bothers me because this behavior is an outcropping of consumerism. Author came from town/city that was not good enough. Thus author wanted more* **. And I say more b/c author continues to have many of the comforts of a residence. Other than lack of community community/roots, which is probably one reason author decided to take up a van in the first place.

And no, not everyone must enjoy things the same way as me. But not recognizing the sources of ones behavior does，along w/ bringing consumerism & the city mindset to a place w/o it.

*These opinions paint in broad strokes and are debatable，and have a good chance of poorly describing the OP. But this van life is a trend, some people see it on social media / blogs & proceed to replicate it, indeed messing with wilderness.

**Thinking about the word more and author's post...six internet links not being enough, evidence in favor of consumerism.

Okay so its not laptops at the campsite that bother you its consumerism at the campsite?

Is it generally accepted that these wavelengths and devices that operate them are safe around humans? Should I feel concerned at all having so many large antennas and amplifiers and what not near me?

I never really stopped to ask this of my phone either, I guess.

This section of the EM spectrum is non-ionizing. So unlike, say, X-rays, you won't get cancer as the waves aren't strong enough to strip an electron off an atom and therefore change your DNA. However, they will heat your cells to some degree (since 2.5GHz is the same freq as a microwave). This can cause cataracts over long exposure to high enough power as your eyes can't regulate heat.

> you won't get cancer

Hold on: heating up part of the human body that are not capable of dissipating heat efficiently can increase cancer risk as well.

Generally accepted by who? You can find some people who are concerned about this stuff. 5G truthers and all that. But nobody in the evidence-based medicine community.

> But nobody in the evidence-based medicine community.

Yup, exactly. Was wondering if there was any data in the evidence medicine based community to be concerned about. Sounds like there isn't.

On the contrary, there's plenty of literature indicating a range of effects on lab rats and so on:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=microwave+exposur...

This is not to say that low power microwave exposure is worse than exposure to pollution, unhealthy food, risks of car accident.

But it would be incorrect to say that microwave transmissions are free from risks.

Nothing is entirely free from risks. That's part of why we do studies on things like this. But, for example, the second study on the page you linked concludes: "At the present state of knowledge there is no positive evidence that pulsed or continuous microwave exposure in the non-thermal range confers elevated risk to the health of the brain."

The mere presence of studies on a subject does not indicate positive evidence of material risk to health.

Still using a Alfa AWUS036ACH for a wireless connection: 802.11ac wave1 from 2015.

There's simply nothing better available, in 6 years of intervening time.

This world would be so so much more awesome if there were some really really good USB wifi adapters. This is yet another further leap, but I also think of all the guides to turning the RPi into an access point, via usb adapters: it starts out working fairly well, but the hardware either has hard maximum client limits or just fails to work well once you get to half a dozen devices. Even if you have something like PCIe or M.2 expandability, options are still extremely limited, & availability is incredibly poor.

Alfa AWUS036ACH is a slapping good WiFi adapter. It's mounted in my roof and I run a 10m USB extension cable from the roof to the network rack.

I'm a huge fan of Alfa gear, for a long time. They do an amazingly good job.

AWUS036ACH is one of Alfa's most up to date USB cards. It is, however based off an RTL8812AU chipset[1], which is 8 years old now[2]. I'd love at least to have a good client chipset & equipment that supports WiFi6 that has good RF performance. I still think the market is overly structured & segmented. No one makes AP-class chips for USB, but to be honest I really think they could & should & that it'd be exceptionally useful & good. But no one dares to threaten the AP market like that.

Thankfully in wifi, RF engineering & antennas count for a huge amount. You still have great gear. But it does hurt me to see what seems like rampant tech-stagnation & neglect, of such a vital, interesting, basic part of modern communication technology: our wireless systems.

[1] https://wikidevi.wi-cat.ru/ALFA_Network_AWUS036ACH

[2] https://github.com/lwfinger/rtl8812au#purpose

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