Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by r0m4n0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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

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