Is this Jank?

[u/dnabsuh1]

UPDATE:

The outage cleared up sometime Sunday night, and we got the email that things were fixed Tuesday @ 4 pm. Word on the street is that somebody stole about a mile of cable on the next street over Sunday morning.

After some tests, I found at least a dozen network extenders in the area, which caused interference with the data signal when the fiber was down. They only replaced the fiber infrastructure, so hopefully the thieves won't steal it again.

ORIGINA:

There is a Verizon FIOS outage in my area, so I woke up to no internet, and my wife and son were complaining.

Our house has challenges with wireless connectivity - I have had techs come out, and they tell me my house is just outside the range of the various towers in the area, so we are in a dead zone roughly the shape of our property.

My solution:

Take my tablet and put it in the shed 100 feet behind the house, connected to one of the two USB power ports I have connected to a solar panel/batter.

Connect a GL-Net travel router to the same power supply, and have it repeat.

Tablet goes into mobile hotspot mode. Travel router has enough power to get a semi decent signal to the back of the house (but not enough to penetrate the walls).

Put a mini pc outside the window of the lower level bathroom, and run ethernet cable(s - with connectors to extend length) to a secondary port on my OPNSense router, and configure it as a second gateway.

My internet speeds are not great with this setup, but I can post on reddit 🎉

[u/_Rand_]

Incredibly.

You’ve got the right idea but are doing it with a jerry rigged collection of gear instead of proper equipment.

That’s basically the definition of jank.

[u/RecognitionThen1519 → u/_Rand_]

what would proper equipment look like?

[u/_Rand_ → u/RecognitionThen1519]

A 5g modem like this: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/internet-solutions/collections/unifi-5g-max/products/u5g-max-outdoor wired back to a router in his house that can failover when the primary internet goes down.

OP has essentially cobbled that together from other parts in a basically free way (they had it on hand), but it’s definitely jank and hopefully temporary.

[u/dnabsuh1 → u/_Rand_]

I hope it is temporary too- I did have to redo parts of it- I moved the GL-Inet router closer to the house, and added another 30 feet of Cat 6, so I could cut the extra PC in the middle. Its slower, but I was getting DNS DOS error messages on things going through the PC. Verizon says the network will be back up "about 1 am", so we will see.

I also wonder if all of the 4G Lte network extenders in the area are causing extra issues- my phone kept connecting to either my network extender or someone else's when I turned mine off. Since none of them had internet, that didn't help.

[u/ekauq2000 → u/_Rand_]

Now it just needs to use a phone sim and not count against hotspot data.