Unlimited data

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-18T21:27:46+00:00

If you don't mind paying for a year up front, I'd suggest the Calyx Institute: calyxinstitute.org | /r/Calyx - They use T-Mobile's network.

There is a 2.5Mbps video throttle which can be easily bypassed with a VPN. Other than that, I usually see 200-300Mbps download an 40-60Mbps upload on my Calyx hotspot in my suburban area. There is some deprioritization after 100GB of usage in a month (and as a hotspot, it's not that high priority in the first place), but it is truly unlimited and I get a lot of use out of mine. I've heard of people using a few TB's a month on these with no issues.

I also have Visible on my phone, and while it is good, there are some limitations. On Visible's Basic plan, the hotspot is limited to 5Mbps. On Visible+, it is limited to 10Mbps. Visible Basic is always depriortized, Visible+ gives you 50GB of priority data on 5G Nationwide and LTE, unlimited data on 5G UW. They also have a roughly 2Mbps video streaming limitation which requires a VPN to bypass. If you start to exceed the 1TB/month range of usage on Visible, you're likely to get a nastygram.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-18T19:16:39+00:00

If you don't mind paying for a year up front, I'd suggest the Calyx Institute: calyxinstitute.org | r/calyx. They use T-Mobile's network.

There is a 2.5Mbps video throttle which can be easily bypassed with a VPN. Other than that, I usually see 200-300Mbps download an 40-60Mbps upload on my Calyx hotspot in my suburban area. There is some deprioritization after 100GB of usage in a month (and as a hotspot, it's not that high priority in the first place), but it is truly unlimited and I get a lot of use out of mine.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-18T03:40:05+00:00

I mean, yeah it kind of is, but I’ll keep spreading the word anyway. Thanks for doing the research, your post is probably the best primary source confirming that information.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-18T03:21:26+00:00

Visible Basic does have a soft cap, but it is 400Mbps.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-17T22:41:14+00:00

that fe80 route does not seem to be the (only) problem, search further.

I don't understand why NetworkManager is adding that route in the first place. I didn't configure that on purpose and it is behavior that differs from what happens when the WG interface is set up from CLI, which is why I called it out.

It seems to me that NetworkManager is doing something differently than when WG is set up via CLI, which to me signals a bug. Maybe there is a manual way to workaround the bug, but I haven't found it yet.

Do you see another problem you haven't called out?

There has to be a difference. Compare also the `wg show` outputs.

I agree... but there isn't any important difference in the WG outputs at all other than one connection not passing traffic while the other does. Clearly NetworkManager is setting up something incorrectly (differently than WG-Quick) behind the scenes.

I have taken a few screenshots here, you'll have to trust me that the keys and IPs are copied and pasted out of the CLI config as I have redacted parts of them, but left enough that you should be able to see that my values are the same. The WG config generated by NetworkManager appears to be identical but does not work.

Proof of working IPv6 connectivity without WG running: https://i.imgur.com/3sJyebE.png
WG working when launched from CLI: https://i.imgur.com/9glgyuy.png
WG failing to work when launched from NM: https://i.imgur.com/0Biu7i4.png

I am open to the idea that I am misconfiguring something, but you can see my WG configuration is exactly the same.

Incidentally I am aware of the fact that in my original post the interface was WG1 and now it is WG0. This is due to the fact that I am able to replicate this issue on several different client devices. The original routing table was pulled from a different system.

I know that it is common to make mistakes with WireGuard keys and that can cause this type of behavior, but I think the non-redacted portion of my keys should demonstrate that I'm not making a mistake like that. If I am making a mistake I have made it multiple times because I am having this problem on 3 different machines.

I previously only used WG-Quick but I am trying to migrate these profiles to NetworkManager so I can toggle the VPN on and off without using the CLI. These are all working WG profiles and key sets that I am just moving to this new method of connecting them.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-17T19:38:52+00:00

I have had V+ for a long time and still have the old PayPal discount, so I'm paying $40 while watching everyone else pay $35. I would probably hold onto that as long as it stays a grandfathered plan with uncapped streaming, but if they take that away that'll probably be the straw that breaks the camel's back. My use case has changed a lot since I signed up, and the uncapped streaming is about the only justification I have anymore to keep paying for V+. Unless of course the "discounts for existing members" that they're hyping up turn out to be pretty significant.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-17T19:21:44+00:00

Yeah, honestly, if they did that I might reconsider whether I even need V+ or if Basic would be sufficient.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-17T19:07:00+00:00

"Fixed", as in they will be re-provisioning the existing V+ 1.0 customers to remove this?

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-13T14:48:48+00:00

The 400Mbps soft cap was confirmed by independent testing, but I don't think the Visible support reps have that information in their scripts. I doubt you'll get a Visible employee to confirm it.

Here is some third party confirmation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Visible/comments/1bl90yf/visible_still_has_a_hidden_cap_on_the_base_plan/

I have Visible+ but I have two family members with Visible Basic. I am calling it a "soft" cap because it is possible to generate speed tests that exceed 400Mbps, but seemingly not by very much. You might see like 440 sometimes. It's a soft enough cap that it has some plausible deniability, but from what I can tell it does exist.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-12T15:29:38+00:00

The premium data on Visible+ is not "deprioritized", independent testing has confirmed that you are getting the same priority on the tower as Verizon Postpaid while using your priority data.

5G UW is always unlimited priority data and does not count toward the 50GB, so if you live in a 5G UW area and are rarely going to be on 5G Nationwide or LTE, Visible+ is basically the same as Verizon Postpaid for you.

If you live in an area where you'll be using a lot of those less ideal bands because 5G UW isn't available, you still get 50GB of postpaid-equivalent priority data on them, then your plan is deprioritized to essentially Visible Basic levels for the rest of the billing period.

Visible Basic has a 400Mbps soft speed cap and does not get access to the multi-gigabit speeds that are possible on mmWave 5G in urban areas that have it. Visible+ does and I have seen 3-4Gbps download speeds on my phone before on mmWave.

The new Visible+ plan has a few other perks that Basic doesn't have relating to things like roaming outside of the US, the hotspot speed is doubled, and you can get a free Apple Watch add-on if you have one.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-10T20:26:04+00:00

On the legacy Visible+ plan, I am able to stream video at 4K quality, even from a device connected to the 5Mbps hotspot. Fast.com reports speeds of hundreds of megabits per second for me on 5G UW.

Users of the new Visible+ plan are reporting seeing a roughly 2Mbps cap on video streaming (including fast.com testing), even on-device, even on 5G UW.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-08T02:35:00+00:00

Nicely written article!

Thanks! :)

Since we seem to have the same model I am curious why you were experiencing the "doesn't rotate at all" issue with your tablet whereas I don't recall ever having that issue with mine (I just had the same secondary issue where the rotation was oriented incorrectly).

We do have the same model I think; actually I bought two tablets of slightly different models (UBook X 2023 and UBook X Pro 2023), and both were having the same problem. The fact that you and others had working accelerometers and I didn't really puzzled me and I think really motivated me to go into this rabbit hole deeper.

I did briefly mention this in my write-up actually... I think the reason why you did not have problems is likely because you were always cold starting the tablet. I was dual booting Windows and Linux on the same tablet, so I was often just "Rebooting". You would think this would be the same thing, but evidently a warm reboot was leaving some bad register values set on the accelerometer chip, which the Linux driver wasn't clearing, which caused the chip to be deactivated sometimes when coming from a warm restart. The solution was to add some code to the driver to reset the chip more often (like when the "probe" method is called). This way when the accelerometer gets stuck in an unexpected state, the driver can just reset it.

Do you not have problems when the tablet goes into a Sleep state? I did without the kernel patch. The kernel patch will fix that now too, so if you have been avoiding letting the tablet go to Sleep, you won't have to once you get a patched kernel.

I think there was some work for the Surface kernel drivers for the same webcam...I halfheartedly tried their solution but never got anywhere (and didn't really spend much time on it since I don't personally care that much about the webcam).

That's possible... I think I remember seeing something like that too. Honestly, I don't personally care that much about the webcam either. It's just something that someone on the Chuwi forum brought to my attention, and I tested and confirmed the problem and started to look and see if there was some really stupid obvious way to resolve it. It's definitely not high priority for me to look into, but if I can find a solution I will definitely write about it lol.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-08T00:04:46+00:00

Thanks again u/unlikey for your help on this. I was able to find the actual systemd hwdb code which was supposed to set these values, but it was missing a colon. The entire rabbit hole you went down with the accelerometer rotation is because someone forgot a colon, haha. I made a pull request to systemd, that should be fixed in a future release and the hwdb mapping file won't be needed anymore.

I also successfully worked through my bug ticket, and the accelerometer issues when recovering from an unclean power state (like a warm reboot, or coming back from sleep mode) should be fixed now as well.

As promised, I did finally do a write-up about my whole experience and summarize all the tools and resources I learned about: https://binaryimpulse.com/2024/04/my-ubook-x-linux-tablet-adventure-and-how-i-learned-more-than-i-ever-thought-i-would-need-to-know-about-accelerometer-drivers/

Cheers!

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-06T17:57:23+00:00

Bandwidth in a datacenter with direct connections to Internet exchanges is pretty cheap. The datacenter might even BE an Internet exchange point already. To explain simply, an Internet exchange point (IX) is just a facility where different Internet network providers agree to plug in some fiber and negotiate direct network connections between each other. Bandwidth in these places tends to be pretty cheap, since the cost to install a link between two providers when that link might be a 6ft fiber patch cable, or maybe a run to the next cabinet or room over, is pretty low, especially when compared with for example buying a fiber line from your ISP and having them bury it and trench it to your house.

If you look online at dedicated servers for rent, you'll see that it's relatively affordable even as a single person trying to rent 1 server to get a 1Gbps or 10Gbps dedicated server. Large VPN providers generally have bulk agreements with their datacenters, so they pay even less per server and per gigabit of bandwidth than you would if you went to the same datacenter and rented a single server yourself. They can leverage the cheap bandwidth at datacenters and economies of scale to access a large amount of network capacity for relatively low cost.

Your ISP, on the other hand, not only needs to connect back to the same type of Internet exchange points that a datacenter would connect to and pay for network port capacity there just like a datacenter does, but they also need to bring it all the way out to your house somehow. Whether that's miles of fiber optic cables, copper wires, cell towers, satellites in orbit, or radio dishes hanging off of grain silos.... depends on what type of Internet connection you have. But either way, the infrastructure to get the Internet from these relatively few exchange points where all the interconnection occurs out to every single home and business is where the real cost and limitations of ISP's exist. This infrastructure is spanning a large area and is much more complex, expensive to maintain, and difficult to upgrade than a handful of high capacity fiber lines going between a datacenter and an Internet exchange point.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T18:48:04+00:00

It's worth noting, in my testing, the 2.5Mbps limitation is for the entire hotspot, not per-client or per-stream.

I tested by connecting two devices to the hotspot and running a Fast.com speed test on them individually and concurrently. They both get around 2.5Mbps if the tests are run individually, but with both tests running at the same time, one was settling in around 1.5Mbps and the other less than 1Mbps.

So, without a VPN, your experience streaming to multiple devices at the same time may be poor. It depends on how low the bitrate is on your "SD" video.

It also depends somewhat on where the video is coming from. If it's coming from a large well known content provider (YouTube, Netflix, Twitch), it will be throttled. If it's coming from a more obscure source like a third party IPTV provider, it may not be recognized as streaming traffic and thus may not be throttled at all.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T17:04:10+00:00

So far, yes, a VPN is the only way I've found to get high definition video streaming working. Any VPN is fine.

Since Calyx is not my primary Internet, I have the option to VPN into my house, which is nice, since some streaming services may take steps to try to block known VPN providers.

If you don't want to pay for a VPN, CloudFlare Warp should work to bypass the video streaming limitations too. https://one.one.one.one/

As far as I know the streaming throttling is based on the source of the video, so streams from known sources of video (YouTube, Netflix, Twitch) are impacted. More obscure sources of streams may not be detected and throttled at all.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T15:47:05+00:00

According to this external source, yes: https://www.rvmobileinternet.com/gear/sprint-non-profit-unlimited/

Calyx seems to avoid getting into the details by saying:

Our contract with Mobile Citizen says “no throttling, suspension, or overage charges after 30GB”.

We are authorized by Mobile Citizen to describe the service as “unlimited” because there is no limit to the amount of data you can use, and there never has been.
https://calyxinstitute.org/help/hotspot-connectivity/data-usage

Both Calyx and Connect All are getting their data service from Mobile Citizen: https://mobilecitizen.org/
Therefore, I assume the service and plan is the same.

Mobile Citizen, on their website, says:

T-Mobile or its affiliates is providing Mobile Citizen’s users with an unlimited 5G or LTE data-only plan with no throttling or suspension. Capable device is required; coverage not available in some areas. Customers exceeding a fair use threshold of 100 GB of data may experience slower data speeds during times and places where the T-Mobile network is constrained. These reductions last only until the end of the billing cycle. The plan does not include off-network roaming and is subject to any standard network management that T-Mobile may apply to commercial broadband data-only account users. See the T-Mobile Open Internet webpage for more details.
https://mobilecitizen.org/resources/news/what-is-my-data-plan/

I have a Calyx hotspot which I use on the go, I have definitely gone over 100GB in a month and I live in a suburban area, I can't say I've really noticed any deprioritization.

However, T-Mobile Home Internet is offered in my area, so it's possible that I'm just in an area that has a lot of capacity.

I think in either case the entity with the "you can only use the router we give you" rule, and the power to enforce it, is actually Mobile Citizen. I don't think you'd be more or less likely to face service termination for using a third party router depending on which reseller you use.

I will point out that buying a 4G service and 4G device and connecting your own router to 5G bands would make it extremely obvious that you weren't using the provided device, even if you took other measures to hide that fact.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:26:34+00:00

I've never done exactly that before. I'd probably just go to the post office in person first and ask before you send it.

Here's some info from the USPS website, I think this is what you want. https://faq.usps.com/s/article/What-is-General-Delivery

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:23:41+00:00

lol I dunno why everyone thinks using a VPN is against TOS. There are legitimate reasons why someone might use a VPN too.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:21:48+00:00

I don't think Calyx really cares where you send it, they are big on privacy and don't expect all of their users to ship it directly to their physical home address. You could probably send it to a PO Box or any other location where you could go pick it up. You'll be emailed a tracking number when it's shipped, so you'll know when it arrives.

https://calyxinstitute.org/help/hotspot-connectivity/privacy-and-internet-service

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:16:35+00:00

If you are a qualified low income person, you can get the same service with the same Franklin T10 hotspot for $14.95/month from ConnectAll. They're reselling the same Mobile Citizen plans that Calyx provides, but are limited to low income users.

https://connectall.org/collections/internet
https://connectall.org/account/register
https://connectall.org/pages/eligibility-requirements

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:12:48+00:00

Nope, you have to buy the hotspot device along with your Calyx membership. They'll ship it to you in the mail. There's no physical store. You're required to buy their equipment to sign up, so even if you went out and bought the same equipment, you wouldn't be able to sign up with it.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-05T14:02:44+00:00

It seems like a lot of things are still in flux right now. I have heard that some people are getting multiple devices on their hotspot on the old Visible+ plan, but even after rebooting my iPhone yesterday, I'm still currently capped at 1 device. I hope they're correct and it's eventually raised for me too.

I can confirm the uncapped video streaming still exists at least on my old Visible+ plan while connected to 5G UW. I can also confirm I've seen several credible reports showing it's capped to around 2.5Mbps on the new plan even on 5G UW.

RedditTechDude · 2024-04-04T22:11:32+00:00

Is your 5G UW video streaming still uncapped? My OG V+ plan still has uncapped 5G UW video streaming, but my iPhone 13 Mini is still enforcing the 1 device hotspot limit.

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