My 4G setup for working remotely from anywhere | Hacker News Reader

My 4G setup for working remotely from anywhere

suraj.dev

81 pointscutio24 comments

Good write-up, and worth bearing in mind for a couple of my clients.

Something related but probably unnecessary in Suraj's case...

Channel bonding (in the networking "not radio frequency" sense of channel) VPNs and similar setups can be used to improve throughput, reliability and consistency, and provide failover etc, by routing traffic across one or more different internet connections.

You can use multiple connections through different providers and connection methods. Multiple 4G, or cable + 4G etc. The traffic then gets reassembled or de-duplicated or whatever's required at the server-end, and then sent onwards as normal.

Speedify looks like a end-user friendly option and doesn't need dedicated hardware. It's got some other fancy stuff built-in (like redundancy for lossy situations like IRL streaming) and have been around years.

I've not used it yet but am an old and happy Connectify Hotspot MAX user.

I've been looking at Speedify more closely lately because my cable connection sometimes drops briefly once in the middle of the night. Timing is largely unpredictable, making tracking it down a nightmare. Lasts long to drop me out of any game I'm in the middle of!

I have access to multiple cellular connections though, one of which is unlimited and the others may as well be.

Some discussion and relevant posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30666248 - Show HN: SmoothWAN a simple home internet bonding router using Speedify

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27088565 for the HN comments, original content deleted.

Reviews: https://www.techradar.com/uk/reviews/speedify https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/speedify-review

There's a number of 5G/LTE solutions that are designed with this sort of connection bonding in mind at relatively affordable prices. I'm retrofitting a teardrop camper for remote work in the boonies and settled on a Pepwave device+external antenna radome that supports dual active LTE (with 2 SIMs per provider - so you can double up on 'lines' and effectively double your data allotment) and will bond those alongside any other connectivity that happens to be available (wired uplink, WLAN bridge etc). It even does packet inspection so you can elect to route high-priority traffic (e.g. conference calling/video meetings) over the bonded route while allowing less important traffic to use your default route. Very useful when you've got one LTE provider that's 'unlimited' and another that's not. You can either use their hosted offering for the bonding 'endpoint', or deploy your own with a free virtual appliance pretty much anywhere. Proprietary...but it just works. No futzing around with software on endpoints.

I did look at the low-end PepWave offerings but was put off by the pricing, especially when combined with their hosted VPN pricing.

I might have misunderstood, but for the bonding feature without setting up my own VPN server in a datacentre it looked like it would require SpeedFusion Cloud product at $589 for every 20TB I transfer. I'd easily hit that in a year at home.

That's more than my unlimited fixed line, my primary unlimited 4G/5G, my 15GB per month secondary 4G/5G, my 50GB per year emergency backup 4G/5G (on a third cellular network), and Speedify, per year combined.

And if I'm willing to set-up a hosted VPN server, I may as well just set up a local Speedify router instead.

I couldn't see the option for redundancy either, where the same traffic is pumped through both lossy interfaces which is especially useful at the edges for 4G coverage, like when IRL streaming in spotty reception.

I can see PepWave would have its use-cases, especially for businesses that can justify the expense. But for me it was less flexible and orders of magnitude more expensive.

[Edit after sithadmin replied: I think PepWave devices support redundancy as "WAN Smoothing".]

Their hosted VPN (FusionHub) service pricing is indeed quite insane. For my use case, I'm using a pretty minimal amount of bandwidth, so I've just deployed my own FusionHub Solo instance.

I use Speedify frequently with an incumbent fiber provider, StarLink, and T-Mobile. Highly recommend.

I've tried Speedify, several times. I keep forgetting that their exit points are widely blocked by many providers.

I guess I could run another VPN on top of Speedify, but then you'd lose all the protocol-specific QoS features and I don't know that the result would really be all that useful.

I'm currently investigating Peplink. So far, I'm having a hard time finding hardware that can support gigabit-class speeds with encryption, IDS/IPS, WAN Smoothing, etc... turned on. If you don't turn on any advanced features, sure you can get reasonably high speeds. But if you do turn on all the obvious features one would want, then throughput plunges through the floor.

Oh, and their hosted service only goes up to 100-200mbps. Beyond that, you need a dedicated hub.

Nice setup. I am going to face somewhat of a different problem where I am moving to next week. The place is on the 15th floor and walking into each room seems to switch to a different cell tower. The living room seems to be the meeting point of multiple towers. No phone call lasts more than 5-10 seconds before one of the party can't hear anything and the call drops.

Given that, I consider my mobile to be a genuine secondary/fallback connection to fiber connection, this has been driving nuts. I discovered this only after I signed the lease and will probably will have to go down the same rabbit hole as Suraj.

If you have a good WiFi signal, you can try VoWiFi (Voice over WiFi) if your phone/carrier supports it.

Great post. The part I would like to know more about is the modem. Ideally, you would buy the modem as a mini pcie/m.2 card separately and hook it up to your linux/openwrt setup rather than using the oem firmware.

When visiting Taiwan several years back I can reliably get 300Mbps connection in a moving train. To put it into perspective, the speed is equivalents to my home fiber connection. A few years after that in a conference, one Taiwanese researcher doing IoT project was making a remark that their 4G connection is more reliable than their home WiFi.

On the other hand,my 4G connection in my house is so lousy that in a good day I can only get a few Mbps. Perhaps I should try some of the tips in the article to improve 4G connection to my house.

I get 5G at my home and it's the worst connection I have ever had(for mobile internet). If it's only one or two bars, literally nothing works. Pages take forever to load. Drop down th 4G and it's silky smooth.

Mofi router and a wilsons direction antenna on my roof, just put in a sim card, router changes your TTL and pretends to be a phone.

If your have unlimited data for your phones (or a tablet sim), you now have unlimited data without paying for hotspot data.

Been using a 4G version for years. They have 5G routers now.

https://mofinetwork.com

I have Starlink now, but the mofi works great.

Hopefully I’ll be able to write up a similar article. Going to bodge an Aliexpress repeater together with a directional yagi and an omni indoors so that it’ll work with anyone’s own device for that provider.

Signal on 3G is okay but wanting to see if I can shoot for stable lte.

Won’t be bothering with MIMO for now just for simplicity. Canadian monthly limits are too low to be concerned with maxing out bandwidth.

I’ve never had good luck finding cellular devices that you could just put a SIM card in (on a standard 4g/5g line). I remember buying a data SIM from T-mobile only it not working in a cellular security camera.

So I just stuck with a cheap 5g phone, sharing data to a rpi over usb, which provides ethernet to a travel/low power AP.

Unfortunately, the cellmapper.net site doesn't seem to work well on mobile devices. And when I try to use it on desktop, it doesn't work much better.

And there don't seem to be any good cell mapper type apps on iOS. The only ones I've found are either specific to a particular tower owner, or they miss a lot of towers that I know are there, or they just don't work well. I've tried at least a half dozen, if not more.

Are there any better solutions in this space?

I went in expecting someone to have discovered Mosh and setting up a self-hosted VPN (a road I'm about to embark on).

What I got was way cooler. I really love reading after-action reports like this.

Ew, using flat panel antenna and cables for a fixed installation is just wasting signal.

Use something like Microtik LHG 4G, or just about anything parabolic with the modem in the focus, it'd be much more faster and reliable.

I did that multiple times - ~1m off-axis sat tv dish and a 4G usb modem fixed in position with duct tape for the best results; microtiks are somewhat worse, but better integrated. His setup wouldn't even see the base station in those places.

> Use something like Microtik LHG 4G

... that is not approved for use in India (in residential settings)? I have checked Microtik if it is approved by Indian authorities but it seems that it isn't, probably because TFA points out that high-gain active boosters are banned.

Microtiks aren't boosters, it's just a dish with LTE modem in the focus.

If they aren't approved (and I can see why - just because no one at Mikrotik can be bothered) -- then use a sat-tv dish and a modem. Surely those are available?

It'll get you 30+ dB gain and no loss in cables.

(edit: besides, in Indian boondocks no one would ever think of checking if a piece of kit is approved. src: many friends there.)

I had to learn ADSL to this extent and more to get decent signal to customers at the ISP I worked at in the 00s. I feel for this guy. Nobody should have to learn a ubiquitous technology like the phone system this deeply just to get basic connectivity to work.

Here in the US, 4g has a very low datacap limit. Less than 50G/mo I'd say

This is fantastic, and I can't wait to use it! Detailed and interesting writeup.

Lost me when it said dBm is the small version of dB. The former is absolute measurement the latter is ratio and needs to be compared to something.

Today I learned a 4G router was a thing that existed. Nice setup

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