Mikeserv Support Forum

I occasionally look at the local neighborhood forum (nextdoor .com) and there was a thread from someone who had just moved to the area asking about ISP recommendations here. One of them was Verizon's Home Internet 5G. Since there is only one wired Internet option here, fiber (there are several fiber ISP's but they all use the same pipe and you can't use two at the same time), I thought this might be a good alternative to Starlink as a backup ISP. I used Verizon FIOS (fiber) for years in California before they sold their fiber infrastructure to Frontier (and now I hear Verizon is going to buy Frontier) and they were decent.


They don't list the speeds but I looked it up, the lowest tier of those three is comparable to Starlink's speeds, around 300 mbs. I wouldn't need it very often, but when my primary ISP goes down again, and it will, I'll be glad to have anything until it comes back online.

The middle tier sounds good for a backup ISP. The lowest one probably has a shittier back end (cheaper peering etc.). It's not only about bandwidth.

Thanks Grogan, that's that's the one I was leaning towards.

Since my mobile phone carrier, US Mobile, allows switching networks, I'm switching my phone from the T-Mobile network to Verizon Mobile so I can test the connectivity. On T-Mobile it's always one bar, same as it was where I used to live. Hopefully Verizon does better than that here.

It could be better if they have different towers, or different priority. Back in the 2000's I had a mobile internet stick from Bell, a modem-like doohickey that plugs into USB. I couldn't use it at all around here. One time, downtown in a second floor apartment I was able to use it to download drivers if I held the netbook up to the window

It was more useful in other places, but Bell bites the weenie. We had better coverage on Rogers here (cell phones) at the time. I think Bell has better coverage around here now, but I'd tie tin cans together with string before I'd ever use Bell again for anything.

Sounds like how it is here, as well as where I used to live, where I get just 1 bar until I go to a nearby town and then it's 5 bars. Well I don't think this is going to work here with Verizon. Verizon's coverage map shows this area is covered but I'm only getting LTE with just 1 bar, occasionally 2, with speed tests of 12 - 22 mbps, most of the time just 12, and it frequently drops out. T-Mobile, the network I was on, has a similar home Internet service but you can't set their router to pass-through. I only get 1 bar with them as well but with a speed of 71 mbps, just a little over the minimum to be considered 5G (50 mbps). So I'm going to change my phone back to T-Mobile's network. There are some other similar services but they probably aren't any better in this area. T-Mobile's network would work for a basic connection, whenever my main ISP is out that's what I'm using on my phone. Back at the last house I was using FIOS as my backup ISP at the lowest tier which was less than 100 mbps at the time. That kept me connected to work without any interruption to speak of when my router automatically switched WANs. Another option here is fixed wireless, several ISP's provide that, but I don't know how that would compare.

That will not do, it will be spotty. 12 mbps would be fine for a backup connection if it was reliable without latency.

I guess if the T-Mobile doesn't work out, it's Uncle Elon for a backup connection.

Turns out I wasn't on T-Mobile's network after all, US-Mobile uses code names for each of the carriers they use and don't display the underlying network. I was actually on AT&T, that's where I get the 71 mbps speed. I looked up AT&T's home Internet 5G and they do allow configuring their router to passthrough. So maybe this would be a good enough alternative to Elon They only offer one tier in this area:

Oh, good then. That's not too expensive if it works out. No contract and no initial investment in equipment fees to lose (unlike the Verizon) if it doesn't.

That actually looks like a pretty good deal, for what it is. (Mobile internet is expensive)

I ran another test today with the same speed test and got 170 mbps. Then I tried another speed test, one that includes latency and jitter. Here's what I got:

146 mbps up
2.12 mbps down
Latency: 210 ms
Jitter: 40.7 ms

A reviewer said even though he was in an area that AT&T's coverage map shows as getting the highest speeds he never saw more than 10 mbps and high latency. Their coverage map also shows that I'm in an area that gets the fastest speeds, though I never get more than 2 bars on my phone. At one point while I still had WIFI turned off on my phone it briefly switched to LTE (4G), so the speed would have been significantly slower, but it was only for a couple seconds. The latency and jitter scores are concerning. This would be a quick and easy option, but I may be better off just going with Starlink after all.

146 mbps up/2.12 mbps down? That's bollocks, the test can't have run correctly.

It looks like Starlink is something you can try risk free too though. It will cost more than that, but if it doesn't work out you can just send back the whole kit and kaboodle and tell them to fuck off.

Here's what I got a little while ago


Well I finally did what I was trying to avoid. I ordered Starlink. It turned out they had a deal going that expires 10/29 for $65/month the first year, and no cost for the equipment which is about $450 to purchase outright. After the first year the monthly payment will be the regular price. It says it arrives in 4 - 5 days, but with the weekend that'll probably be early next week.

Peace of mind, having a good backup connection. That AT&T airhead shit will be dodgy. It's late at night, so it's good NOW. That goes to show that the towers are multiplexing communications.

It's a weird little receiver for Starlink, eh? It looks like a little solar panel that you place near a window.

Yeah I figured with that cellular service I'd probably still be unable to work, Citrix stuff is very sensitive to connection instability. Out of curiosity I looked up where the nearest cell towers are, I used this site. I was expecting it to be in one of the nearby towns but all three carriers have towers just 1.4 miles away, all located next to the fire station. I looked at the location on Google maps:

... and if you look closely, you can see a Jawa sandcrawler in the distance

(I couldn't help but notice how bleak that looks)

So it's not the distance from the cell towers that's the problem, it's usage.

Some parts look a little better. Here's one not far from here:

It also looks better in the spring time when the bushes and trees are green.

It's a lot greener down in the Sierra Vista area, South-East of Tuscon, it has an almost tropical look in some of the views I saw. One house I was initially considering I quickly dismissed when I noticed the road sign adjacent to the house where the road dips: "don't cross when flooded". The vegetation was especially dense alongside what probably becomes a river during monsoon season.

The Stargate equipment is coming a little earlier than expected, it shipped from Phoenix today via FedEx and scheduled to arrive tomorrow. My install date is Nov 10 in the afternoon, with a 4 hour window (third party installers).

Oh, I would have thought that was a self install but I guess they'll position the thing properly for you and stuff.

You didn't exactly move there for the scenery anyway, as daylight burns for creatures like us

Yeah they typically attach it to the eves of the roof and then run an Ethernet cable from it into the attic and down to a wall port to connect to their router, which I'll set to pass-through to my router.

Especially in the summer time when it's 115 F

I guess what I looked at was the rig for mobile starlink service. It's just a little slanted panel that you position yourself.

The 3rd party Starlink installer was a no-show today. It was a 5 hour window and he never showed up. It would have been one thing if he at least sent a text or called to say he couldn't make it but there was zero communication. I did a search on this company not showing up, and found others with the same outcome. It turns out they're just brokers who give work to subcontractors, so I guess it's just a matter of who you end up with. I think I'm just going to find one on my own, someone who'll come by at a specific time instead of maybe sometime during a big 5 hour window. I hate those long windows, the odds are you won't be in a position to run to the door when they randomly show up. Some said they just kept pushing the install day back and they finally just installed it themselves. I found a company in the nearby town that does this, looks like they also do Ethernet drops.

Well that bites the weenie.

I can't stand those kinds of service calls, where you have to wait all day for them. I once had them show up early. I was taking courses in Mississauga, while living in Etobicoke (a district of Toronto) and was going to get this Internet service hooked up that was on the roof of the apartment building, wireless on the roof, and a coax connection to the apartments. I had to cut out of school early, and drive like a bastard (a good 20 minute drive in traffic)

I came home about 15 minutes before they were supposed to be there, to find a note on my door that they had been and gone. I was fucking spitting nails mad, and I called them up. They weren't going to do it anyway though, because they didn't have permission to disconnect my cable to use the coax. I had canceled cable service so it shouldn't have been a problem, but it was "complicated".

I told them all to fuck off, stayed on dialup (that was my last hope for anything faster) realized I still had free cable TV (I didn't even know, I was just using some amplified rabbit ears) and lived happily ever after until I moved. Back here, which only had dialup in 2001

Unexpected turn of events today - they showed up! I wasn't anticipating that since the scheduled day had come and gone. It was two techs, one guy with a big gray beard and his trainee. They were able to run the cable through the same existing hole in the wall used for the fiber cable so no need for a new hole. After they got the dish mounted and wired to the router it was up and running pretty quickly. After work I ran a 50' run of Ethernet (had to extend it a few extra feet with an extension block) and then set the Starlink router to bypass mode. So now I have a 2nd WAN again

Initially he was searching for a media box the access panel in the wall where normally all coax and Ethernet cables in the walls of a house would terminate, but for whatever reason this house doesn't have one, anywhere. I looked for one when I first moved in. He was floored by the lack of a media box because - where do the coax cables terminate? There's also a solitary Ethernet port behind the TV cabinet left by the previous owners that also seems to go nowhere. Wish I had a wiring diagram for this house. If I can get a metal building built behind the house and Ethernet drops in each room I thought I'd have them terminate in the metal building where I'll relocate my router.

Well that's good news! I hope it works out.

Yep, when you buy a house you inherit someone else's mess. Just be glad it wasn't an "engineer" that lived there before you

So I unintentionally tested the Starlink connection all day today because I had the WANs plugged into the wrong NICs lol! After work I swapped them so that the fiber connection is primary and Starlink is failover. But it worked great all day while working, I didn't even notice.

That's great then. It can't be that much latency if you didn't notice it with your VPN shit. That's how you need it to be, for a viable fallback. While inadvertent, that was a good test that you really needed to do anyway.

My fiber connection was unstable today, never completely out but pages would incompletely load, images wouldn't show up, and my Citrix apps would freeze up. It wasn't enough to trigger the failover so I finally just pulled the Ethernet cable to force it to failover. Everything was OK after that so that so I could continue working. After work I plugged it back in and it seems fine now. Not sure what was going on. If that had happened a month ago I would have been SOL

You got that starlink service just on time then. That doesn't sound like a great ISP behind that fiber connection. It could also be upstream from them, that nonsense you described today.

Though, nothing is 100% perfect. The thing is, that 0.01th time it does happen, isn't OK

Yeah I've never had so much trouble with an ISP. There are some other fiber ISP's here but they all use the same fiber connection so I don't know if they'd be any better. One of the outages I experienced impacted all of them.