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reliable off-grid internet for monitoring - what are you using?

Kingdom of Spain, in my area the best solution was a 4G repeater with an antenna on the roof.
The "local" company you mention probably offers WiMax. We have one here, Conecta Balear. They only offered 7 megabits for €42/month (or 12 for €78). And then you need to pay for a mobile phone line separately. With my 4G I get easily 5-6 times as that. Repeater is some 7 km. away, line of sight.
With ION mobile I get mobile phone SIM, a "dual SIM" that I use in a small router, 120G (!) a month, pretty much unlimited calls, all for €22.
They use the Movistar network - horrible company, but they have the best coverage (the only coverage in this area).
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My sympathy. Looks like I'm better off on San Miguel de La Palma. I mean, apart from occasional volcanic eruptions ... :cool:

Yeah, WiMax. They have options for 4/8/20/40 Mbit/s upload (Verimax). I had opted for the 8, which was enough for me. Usually it actually was a bit (pun) faster than that ... like up to 11.
 
How are you better off if you pay €40 for 11 megabits - and separately for you phone line, and I pay €22 for 30-40 including the phone line? :unsure:
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[UPDATE] I moved the mofi 4500's factory paddle antennas up higher on the cabin veranda outdoors and aimed toward the nearest Verizon tower ...which is about 15-20 miles away. I'm getting 1-5Mbs. ...Not bad. Too early to know if the mofi itself will be more stable than the alcatel hotspot.
 
Don B. Cilly said:
Kingdom of Spain, in my area the best solution was a 4G repeater with an antenna on the roof.
The "local" company you mention probably offers WiMax. We have one here, Conecta Balear. They only offered 7 megabits for €42/month (or 12 for €78). And then you need to pay for a mobile phone line separately. With my 4G I get easily 5-6 times as that. Repeater is some 7 km. away, line of sight.
With ION mobile I get mobile phone SIM, a "dual SIM" that I use in a small router, 120G (!) a month, pretty much unlimited calls, all for €22.
They use the Movistar network - horrible company, but they have the best coverage (the only coverage in this area).
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Click to expand...
I don't get how those business models work. They piggy back on the movistar infrastructure, yet are able to offer a cheaper plan than movistar. Here in Peru there is Bitel, which works the same way. Isn't it just a matter of time before Movistar raises rent prices and squashes the competition?
 
They're called mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs). We have lots of them in Spain.
Most have their own (use commercially internationally available ones, like VPN providers and such) data network, and just use the main operator's repeaters.
Apparently the main operators are compelled to share their access by European (antitrust) laws.
They also probably don't care that much, because they get paid for it and don't have to provide customer support, billing and such... I guess ;·)
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jbatx said:
[UPDATE] I moved the mofi 4500's factory paddle antennas up higher on the cabin veranda outdoors and aimed toward the nearest Verizon tower ...which is about 15-20 miles away. I'm getting 1-5Mbs. ...Not bad. Too early to know if the mofi itself will be more stable than the alcatel hotspot.
Click to expand...

More to my story. Those morons told me the alcatel Hotspot didn't cycle down and also had an external antenna hookup.

I was looking to get away from my prepaid account (for data).

Currently run thus modem: NETGEAR 4G LTE Broadband Modem - Use LTE as Primary Internet Connection (LB1120) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N5ASNTE/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_489N3J7Q8SMMAZ75PKH8

Absolutely rock solid connection. Going to stay with it and not pickup the alcatel hotspot and post-paid account.

I get 14MBPS. Its at an intermittent use cabin. Use for monitoring cameras, generator control and an Alexa. The Alexa is hooked to a loudspeaker so I can yell at intruders. Also run a sonoff relay box to turn on lights before I arrive.

It does not have wifi so you need to run your own router as an access point.
 
So far it's been solid. No outages at all since setting up. I do get plenty of packet drop with the repeater 300' away even with the yagi connected to the mofi. But, it doesn't phase the devices at all, they can send the telemetry data over crappy connections since the payload is tiny
 
jbatx said:
So far it's been solid. No outages at all since setting up. I do get plenty of packet drop with the repeater 300' away even with the yagi connected to the mofi. But, it doesn't phase the devices at all, they can send the telemetry data over crappy connections since the payload is tiny
Click to expand...
What repeater?
 
I'm having good luck with the 5G TMobile gateway. You can hook an external antenna to it, although it's not set up for that.
Sometimes I get 200mbps download but mostly it's 100 to 150.
And it's only $50/month for life; guaranteed to never go up as long as you never cancel.
 
BMcL said:
I'm having good luck with the 5G TMobile gateway. You can hook an external antenna to it, although it's not set up for that.
Sometimes I get 200mbps download but mostly it's 100 to 150.
And it's only $50/month for life; guaranteed to never go up as long as you never cancel.
Click to expand...
Not available for me at home or my remote cabin.
 
hey update on my starlink. My dish cable broke and starlink RMA'd me a new one. The old one was ver1-proto1 or something, the new one is ver2-proto3. The difference in power usage is drammatic. 90-120 watts to 35-80 watts, HOWEVER for some reason every once and a while ( I think clouds) it jumps to 180 watts for a few minutes. Still, it usually hangs in there to 35w

So the newer version of the starlink dish are almost comparable to 5g base stations (15-35w) in terms of power usage.

Recently ELon went on twitter saying that starlink can be powered by a cigarette lighter in the new rom. I haven't received any firmware update but when I do I hope it goes down even more (hopefully disable that spike)
 
offgriddave said:
hey update on my starlink. My dish cable broke and starlink RMA'd me a new one. The old one was ver1-proto1 or something, the new one is ver2-proto3. The difference in power usage is drammatic. 90-120 watts to 35-80 watts, HOWEVER for some reason every once and a while ( I think clouds) it jumps to 180 watts for a few minutes. Still, it usually hangs in there to 35w

So the newer version of the starlink dish are almost comparable to 5g base stations (15-35w) in terms of power usage.

Recently ELon went on twitter saying that starlink can be powered by a cigarette lighter in the new rom. I haven't received any firmware update but when I do I hope it goes down even more (hopefully disable that spike)
Click to expand...
Same issue. Starlink is full in my home area and my cabin has no address.

My neighbor at my cabin brings his starlink from home.

It's the Bees Knees. 100MBPS. Wifi calling and no weather fade.
 
offgriddave said:
hey update on my starlink. ... 35-80 watts
Click to expand...

Very cool. I was on the beta list but cancelled when AT&T updated by nearby tower to 5g. Even the 4g had been working well handling all my remote work needs, streaming, etc. I couldn't stomach the 100w 24/7 extra power needed for Starlink. I could definitely go for 35w. I've got a sweet deal where the AT&T data only costs $30/mo, so I'm happy with that for now.
The Netgear Nighthawk MR5100 router for 5g has been very reliable. The MR1100 I had for 4g worked ok, but it was quirky. Ethernet port didn't work, screen would lock up, etc.
Both units work fine with the battery removed, so a dumb timer that cycles power every day would be a good reset option for a remote location.
 
LazyDragon said:
Very cool. I was on the beta list but cancelled when AT&T updated by nearby tower to 5g. Even the 4g had been working well handling all my remote work needs, streaming, etc. I couldn't stomach the 100w 24/7 extra power needed for Starlink. I could definitely go for 35w. I've got a sweet deal where the AT&T data only costs $30/mo, so I'm happy with that for now.
The Netgear Nighthawk MR5100 router for 5g has been very reliable. The MR1100 I had for 4g worked ok, but it was quirky. Ethernet port didn't work, screen would lock up, etc.
Both units work fine with the battery removed, so a dumb timer that cycles power every day would be a good reset option for a remote location.
Click to expand...

I'd rather have at&t hotspot. the dish sometimes spikes to 180w and doesn't stay at 35. When it is cloudy
 
Checkthisout said:
What's causes its wattage use to go up?
Click to expand...

I think the rain and clouds. Just a little bit of fog and it spikes up. It also disconnects every 2 minutes all the time making zoom or voip impossible. I guess when they get 4000 satellites up there it'll be better. Just watched a launch yesterday, another 50+ satellites. The big rocket apparently is going to put 400 at a time. Also it went from 150-200mb to 35mb.
 
offgriddave said:
I think the rain and clouds. Just a little bit of fog and it spikes up. It also disconnects every 2 minutes all the time making zoom or voip impossible. I guess when they get 4000 satellites up there it'll be better. Just watched a launch yesterday, another 50+ satellites. The big rocket apparently is going to put 400 at a time. Also it went from 150-200mb to 35mb.
Click to expand...
Got it. I was wondering if it's wattage use fluctuated as satellites moved across its field of view.

So fog kills the signal as well?
 
If you get fog, it will barely work. Heavy rain (like major storm) is bad, but fog is worse. I could be hallucinating and there's some weird chance that starlink could have had network outages at the exact same time I've had fog, but it seems that way. Not sure what frequency fog resonates with.
 
offgriddave said:
If you get fog, it will barely work. Heavy rain (like major storm) is bad, but fog is worse. I could be hallucinating and there's some weird chance that starlink could have had network outages at the exact same time I've had fog, but it seems that way. Not sure what frequency fog resonates with.
Click to expand...
Bummer.

The area where I would like to use it is nothing but fog and thick clouds. Your description brings back memories of trying to use Sirius radio while driving in treed, mountainous terrain.
 
it's so difficult to get reliable information about starlink because of elon musk fanboy-ism. The best I can figure out is that yes, everyone, evn without obstructions, is getting random disconnects. Now these aren't your normal packet drops. If you know the OSI layer, something is sending TCP resets but DNS queries are affected as well. You browse to a page and half way through it snaps and shows the browser error blank page no connection then suddenly a split second later it'll reload. With each firmware update, which are about once a week, things change. Its as if the engineers a brute forcing every possible combination of bug fix in the field. Also we were told we were out of beta, but apparently we're still in this beta stage. Quasi-beta. The power consumption, connection reliability, weird OSI-layer hickups, and bandwidth change weekly with this firmware upgrade. It's a wack a mole. I didn't sign up for this. And it's expensive.

SSH connections, Zoom, VOIP just don't work or expect a random disconnect every 2 minutes. Even with SSH settings that keep the connection alive. I'm to lazy to load up wireshark.
 
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