Rural Internet

   / Rural Internet #51  
Are you sure the weed is medical and not for the Bruce?
 
   / Rural Internet
  • Thread Starter
#53  
So I'm pulling this back up because I'm going to experiment a little with my Mofi. The unit that Ubifi sells is supposed to support Verizon, which is a bit faster at my place than AT&T. It looks like Verizon has an unlimited pre-paid plan for $70/mo but, it's going to be a little bit of a hassle to get it. I think I know what I need to do, buy a cheap Verizon hotspot, activate a SIM and them put it into the Mofi, so I'm going to give it a go and see what happens.

I also see an AT&T unlimited pre-paid plan for $30/mo, the only catch is it might get prioritized after 22GB. I've got a bunch of AT&T SIMs here to try that with as well. I'm not really sure whether I want faster or cheaper though. Anyway, I'm going to goof about with it and report back with my findings. It'll take a couple of months at Lea because I know I'm too cheap to waste data I've paid for. LOL
 
   / Rural Internet #54  
I think I know what I need to do, buy a cheap Verizon hotspot, activate a SIM and them put it into the Mofi, so I'm going to give it a go and see what happens.

I'm very very interested in the outcome of this experiment!

The best internet I can get without cellular at my house is a wifi internet at 3Mbps, and last I had it the quality was poor (many outages). I don't have anything remotely line-of-sight, no fiber or cable in the ground (with service I can have - a Gigabit fiber loop was installed a couple years ago on our road but it's not for mere mortals apparently) so I dropped it and lost my static ip with it... I survive off of cell phone hotspot.

I tried VZW's hotspot service, but at the time it was a lot of money for like 20GB/month which was laughable, we burned through it in less than two weeks then, and I can't imagine it lasting even a week now.

How "unlimited" is their service now? I have the family on an "unlimited" plan which gives 22GB/month per line with no throttling, and then they may get throttled if the "local tower is congested" past 22GB but we haven't seen that.
 
   / Rural Internet
  • Thread Starter
#55  
It doesn't say anything about prioritization on this one. Of course, the only way to really know sometimes is to try it. Screenshot_20190116-185423.jpeg
 
   / Rural Internet
  • Thread Starter
#56  
I got my $25 MiFi today so I was able to order a prepaid Verizon SIM for $65/mo unlimited with auto-pay setup, it should be here in a couple of days and I can see if it's as easy to switch the SIM into the Mofi as it looks like it will be.

Another thing I've noticed is that if I activate an AT&T SIM card on buyasession.att.com using the Mofi IMEI, my data plan options are $25/mo for 5GB or $360/yr for unlimited so, if the Verizon SIM doesn't work out, I can purchase the annual unlimited AT&T for $360 and drop from the $80/mo with Ubifi to $30/mo. There is nothing in the fine print on that one about prioritization or throttling after a certain threshold. (Plan and term screenshots below)

Verizon is 3x the speed of AT&T here though so, I'm hoping it works well, it's still $15/mo cheaper and I like fast better than cheap. That SIM will be here Monday so, I'll update then.


ATT1.jpg

ATT2.jpg
 
   / Rural Internet #57  
So I'm pulling this back up because I'm going to experiment a little with my Mofi. The unit that Ubifi sells is supposed to support Verizon, which is a bit faster at my place than AT&T. It looks like Verizon has an unlimited pre-paid plan for $70/mo but, it's going to be a little bit of a hassle to get it. I think I know what I need to do, buy a cheap Verizon hotspot, activate a SIM and them put it into the Mofi, so I'm going to give it a go and see what happens.

I also see an AT&T unlimited pre-paid plan for $30/mo, the only catch is it might get prioritized after 22GB. I've got a bunch of AT&T SIMs here to try that with as well. I'm not really sure whether I want faster or cheaper though. Anyway, I'm going to goof about with it and report back with my findings. It'll take a couple of months at Lea because I know I'm too cheap to waste data I've paid for. LOL

I'm very interested in your experiment with the $70 unlimited Verizon account. I have better Verizon signal than AT&T is really the only reason, but if it saves $19/month as well, then may be well worth it. I'll be most curious to know if it has throttling or not as that would be the ultimate detractor.
 
   / Rural Internet
  • Thread Starter
#59  
I got the Verizon SIM today, it took some trial and error to get it working correctly with the Mofi. Ultimately, these are the steps you need to follow:

1 - Put the SIM in the Verizon JetPack you used for an IMEI to order the SIM, power it up and connect. I think it needs this step for Verizon to verify the SIM went where it was supposed to.
2 - Insert the Verizon SIM into the Mofi and perform a factory reset on the device. When it reboots, it should detect the everything correctly and connect to the Internet. I setup a custom APN of vzwinternet. I'm posting a few images showing the signal strength, speed test result and my configuration for the Sierra card.

So now I find out if unlimited is truly UNLIMITED, I'll know within a week the way we go through data. Signal strength with from -105dBm on AT&T to -85dBm to -90dBm with Verizon and the speed test went from 8/3 to 26/21.

We're running on Verizon now, in fact I'm watching streaming TV and posting over it. I'll update in a week or so with our data usage and speed to see if we're getting prioritized.

Modem Settings.jpg

Status.jpg

VZSpeed.jpg
 
   / Rural Internet
  • Thread Starter
#60  
We've used 70GB since I switched to Verizon so I believe this really is UNLIMITED unlimited. I have noticed that carrier aggregation never gets assigned with Verizon but, I'm still running at 23Mbps or higher whenever I run a speed test so I don't really need it, it's faster without it than AT&T was with it.
 

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