Mobile hotspot

[terracore]

Anyone know if you can get fiber run to vacant land?  It’s right at the corner of my property on the pole. Do they require a permitted house and a proper address to run a drop from the pole?

That depends on what your definition of vacant land is.  If the land has an appropriate pole to run the fiber to they will do it.  There have been other posts on this forum about it.  They may require an address so that they have a way to put you into their system, but you can get an address for vacant land by requesting it from the county.

[Edenrocker]

Thanks!

[terracore]

I ordered the Solis Lite on Amazon on December 13 and received it today. I don't know if it was a black friday deal or what but it was $99 (currently $139).

Since I was waiting for the wife to finish a meeting I set it up in the car. It only took a few minutes and came with 1GB of "global data". It connected to AT&T. The data speeds seemed acceptable but I didn't measure them, but I could watch youtube videos without it buffering. It has a feature where you can force it to scan for a better carrier and when I did that in a different part of town it connected to T-Mobile*, and again later to Verizon, and then later back to T-Mobile*. It takes about 3 minutes to complete a scan, and it limits how many scans you can do in an hour.

When I got home it was still connected to T-Mobile* and I did an internet speed test and it was about 4 MB/sec. I pressed the scan button and it connected to AT&T but the speed was only 0.96 MB/sec. Then I encountered the "too many scans in an hour" message and turned the unit on and off, rescanned, and it went back to T-Mobile.

So all in all its a useful gadget but my main complaint is that it's scanning doesn't necessarily find the network with the fastest speed. Maybe that is something they will fix with a firmware update.

The biggest perk obviously is having internet when Hawaiian Telcom has outages. The other perk is that I can take it with me in the car and potentially have internet where my phone (Verizon) doesn't. They claim the built in battery lasts for 16 hours and also functions as a battery pack so you can charge your phone or other devices with it. The data plans are cheaper than what I could get through my phone carrier.

They sell a more expensive model ($262) that has an app controlled camera/microphone for streaming photos or video. That might be a convenient feature for somebody who is off grid and wants to keep an eye on their place remotely.

*T-Mobile recently acquired Sprint. I could be wrong but as I understand it the two networks aren't completely integrated so I don't know if it was connecting to Sprint or T-Mobile antennas but they are both called "T-Mobile" now.

How's this for irony? Our fiber went out as I was typing this so I turned the Solis unit on to post this reply.

[terracore]

Update: I found that with some patience I can get the unit to connect to Verizon for the fastest speed at my house.

Also, by using this gizmo: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014SK2H6W?psc=1&linkCode=ll1&tag=pw016-20&linkId=91e8e1685ebf4df173711309a5320929&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl I can connect the mobile hotspot puck to my wireless mesh. Basically it's a wifi to ethernet bridge to feed the mesh. This greatly increases the range, the number of devices that can connect at once, and everything is transparent to the connected devices (no need to use the hotspot login or password etc) so everything including distant wifi security cameras etc works just like if the fiber was running.