We’re back!
It’s been a while since I posted here, and we’ve had a few changes.
First off, I now have AT&T for my mobile phone service! And summarily I am leveraging one of their iPad LTE SIMs for LTE in Internet in a Box now.
As the post title implies, I am doing copious testing with this SIM card in an AT&T-branded NETGEAR MR1100 “M1 Nighthawk” LTE router and so far the results are promising.
Anime Weekend Atlanta is at the end of October this year, and I had us reserved at the Courtyard Atlanta Cumberland/Galleria, so my initial tests were done there using a NETGEAR LB1120 that had ended up having terrible speeds as did my iPhone 8. Thus far I’ve not had a chance to test there with the MR1100 as of yet. However, something happened that will make testing there a moot point…
I was having difficulty sleeping the other night which lead me to check the Embassy Suites Atlanta Galleria, our preferred hotel, for open rooms outside the convention block… and they had some. Score! I booked it then queried one of my friends the next morning whether I should book there or not and got back “F**k yes.” Needless to say, the reservation at the Courtyard was cancelled that morning after I verified that yes, I had indeed made a reservation at the Embassy.
The next phase of testing will be done this Saturday from Akers Mill Square or the Synovus bank next door, both of which are close enough to the Embassy to give a similar test. I’m hoping locking the MR1100 on Band 66 will give the speed we desire. Once that testing is done, everything will get buttoned up and prepped for Halloween weekend and the convention.
As a side note, this site and all my other personal sites have been migrated to a server I have hosted at Coloblox, which is incidentally across 285 from the Galleria near SunTrust Park at 1100 Circle 75 Parkway. The datacenter has roof access, and the sales guy I was dealing with said I could get roof access, which makes me think if I ever decide to spring for my own 5U or 10U cabinet there I might consider doing some sort of fixed wireless and shooting across to the Embassy, but there’s no guarantee of line of sight to the room we’d be in. A pity as that would be quite nice.
That doesn’t mean we won’t have access my colo and home networks from Internet in a Box though: I have an IPsec tunnel between my home network and the datacenter, and the hAP ac Lite has an IPsec tunnel back to the datacenter. I’m able to reach both networks seamlessly, so there may be some shenanigans!
I’ll update with the test results soon!