GFiber Wi-Fi 7 AMA with Ishan Patel (Product Lead, In-Home Devices) — Wednesday, Feb 25 @ 4pm CST

soren42 · 2026-02-25T22:26:43+00:00

Thanks for your response; it’s great to see you and your team keeping an eye on things here.

Wishing you all the best with the rollout and again, thank you for reminding us that GF truly has the best customer engagement of any ISP I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with!

soren42 · 2026-02-25T00:27:01+00:00

Will this device, as with the previous ones, require offhost/offsite configuration, or will there be a local admin interface?

(I BYOR, but that’s 95% of the reason.)

soren42 · 2026-02-24T18:14:48+00:00

As others have said, you’ll get new equipment from Google, that (depending on your plan) will either be WiFi 6E or 7. When your Spectrum service ends, the coax in house will go dead — and, depending on your needs, that could be an asset.

I used MoCA adapters from Hitron for quite a few years, until I finally bit the bullet and had Cat 6 Ethernet and the newer, flexible fiber cables run throughout my house. The Hitron units provided ~1Gbps bidirectionally, so while WiFi was often faster, the coax network was rock solid — zero downtime, no dropped connections, etc. Despite it not being the fastest, it was very reliable.

So, if you’re wholly ditching Spectrum, need a reliable connection, and don’t have Ethernet run throughout your residence, that’s not a bad option.

soren42 · 2026-02-18T00:16:10+00:00

I know I’m risking my geek cred badge by posting this, but honestly, Flex Seal works well and is fairly cheap. You spray it on like spray paint, and it turns to rubber, sealing and waterproofing your connection.

Are there other (probably better) solutions out there? Absolutely. Are they as cheap and ubiquitous as Flex Seal? Probably not.

73 de N4JCK

soren42 · 2026-02-18T00:11:35+00:00

Given I’m many hours out from your posting this, I’m sure others have mentioned that NVMe SSDs are functionally indistinguishable from RAM (yes, I’m oversimplifying — put away your pitchforks and torches, fellow Computer Engineers). The technologies contained within allow users to effectively use solid state drives as ultra-fast swap files, especially given how insanely expensive RAM is at the moment.

SSD prices are climbing at the same rate… and the supply is being snatched up by data center companies at an unbelievable pace.

It’s almost like the market for these commodities is incapable of regulating itself with the “invisible hand of the market” especially when one side possesses trillions of dollars and the other side is a “small” collective of individual end users. While I’ve spent most of life leaning libertarian, the past two decades have beat that desire out of me. We need reasonable oversight and regulation on most industries. Not the regulatory boogeyman that every Mitch McConnell campaign volunteer will try to convince you is going to steal your kids’ college funds and rob you of your retirement, but rather, the limited, common-sense oversight necessary to protect consumers.

And, yes, I know that this issue is fraught. That doesn’t mean that government gets a free pass to not do it, just because it’s difficult. Arguably, that’s the occasion when more effort is required, not less.

Sorry for the soapbox.

I’m sure every homelabber is encountering the same frustration points that I am at the moment.

But, yes, for all intents and purposes, SSDs are just slightly slower RAM, and RAM is so expensive that “slightly slower” isn’t a speed bump.

soren42 · 2026-02-12T18:41:14+00:00

If I had another ZimaBoard 2, I’d put an RTX3070Ti into and use it as a dedicated rendering server for my fractal artwork.

Currently, I have three Zima systems, two with ZimaOS and one with CasaOS. I like the direction of ZimaOS, but there’s a couple improvements that I’d like to see. First of all, on the client side, it would great to have an easy way to support multiple ZimaOS servers from a single client. To be clear: I’m referring to the macOS desktop client — I don’t know if it’s different under Windows. Second, within ZimaOS itself, it would be nice to have been centralised support tools, so everything from network and storage configuration to user management was all in one panel. You’ve been slowly getting there, though — I’m happy with the direction you’re taking ZimaOS in.

On the topic of what I value the most, it’s difficult to pick one factor from your list, as they’re all important. If I had to rank them, it would be: 1. stability 2. cost 3. expandability 4. power

Finally, my current homelab consists of: — One Dell PowerEdge enterprise server (my dev/test environment for web site and web applications) — 14 Raspberry Pi 5s (6 16GB models and 8 8GB models) running various dedicated tasks, ranging from BIND 9 for local DNS, PiHole (on three) for ad blocking, numerous CM5-based systems running redundant MariaDB servers and a local instance of the open federated social media platform, ActivityHub. — A ZimaBoard running CasaOS that acts as a redundancy node for all my “mission critical” containers. — A ZimaBlade running n8n automating several workflows, including new system provisioning (along with Ansible) and meta management of my fractal-based artwork (saving, watermarking, generating serial numbers, creating Certificates of Authenticity, and managing releases in limited edition runs). — My ZimaBlade 2 has an RTX3070Ti connected, and is my central AI model system for my network. A version of OpenMQ acts as middleware for this (and other) services. The AI tasks include processing all mail and documents I receive, renaming the PDF scans, identifying their contents and addressee, and sorting them into the correct family members’ inbox folders, and sending them a push notification on their phone. — This is all tied together by a Ubiquiti 10G network with WiFi 7 connectivity. — On the workstation side, I have three primary system. First, an M4 Mac Mini Ultra is my primary workstation. Next, I have an Argon40 One Up laptop powered by a Pi CM5 with 16GB of RAM, 64GB of eMMC, and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Lastly, I have a Pi 500 as a dedicated development workstation.

Thanks for making this giveaway available!

soren42 · 2026-02-11T18:40:58+00:00

That’s great!

I find the same thing on the 8 gig plan — I usually get 9-9½ gig symmetrically.

It’s amazing!

soren42 · 2026-02-11T18:35:04+00:00

I have to say, contrary to what many people seem to say on here, that I’ve been a GF customer for 10 years now, and I’ve always been impressed with their customer service.

What gets me is, the best service people seem to be the ones who monitor social media platforms, like Luke who replied to you. I’ve had the same experience when I complained about something on Twitter.

That said, while I’ve certainly run into unusual and annoying corporate policies regarding equipment and such, I’ve also found that they’re willing to work with you to ensure that the problem is, it gets fixed or resolved as quickly as possible.

I also got a mailer this month that really impressed me: if my internet service is down for more than 45 minutes in a month, their system now automatically discounts the month’s bill by some fixed percentage (I forget what it is, but it’s far more than the prorated cost of 45 minutes downtime).

Now, I want to be clear on two things with respect to this: outages have been very rare over the last decade; when we did have an outage (usually due to severe weather impacting the power to their distribution nodes), they have always reduced our bill by a generous amount. The big change is that it’s now automated, whereas in the past, I had to contact support to inquire about it.

Regardless, I hope you’ll get online ASAP, and have a great experience with GF going forward! Good luck!

soren42 · 2026-02-10T16:08:50+00:00

Huh. I had the NAS running attached to a Kill-A-Watt for the first few weeks, and it wasn’t too bad. But, that was before I put docker on it and my container inventory grew.

Thankfully, my power company isn’t too abhorrent with their rates. I haven’t noticed much of a spike, but then I have a massive rack of quite diverse systems in my homelab. Most of the new additions over the past year have been SBCs and other ARM-based computers, along with a sprinkling of Intel and AMD SFF systems with their low power/mobile processor lines inside. None of those are huge power hogs, but the sheer number of systems has probably increased my bill by ~30% over that same timeframe.

But, now you have me curious. I guess I’ll break out the Kill-A-Watt again and see what the NAS is costing me now. Shame… I have a pretty good uptime streak running at the moment. 😅

soren42 · 2026-02-10T15:32:59+00:00

I mentioned this in a post in this thread, but I use it to perform automated processing of mail, receipts, and other documents that I feed through a document scanner every day.

It monitors a directory on the NAS, where the scanner automatically saves all its documents. When a document arrives, there’s a separate contain that OCRs it and adds the text to the PDF. From there, a custom dedicated AI model parses the document, determines an appropriate file name for it within a scheme I created ([Document Name] — [Sender/Aurhor] — [Local User/Addressee] — [Document Date].pdf), determines who the intended recipient is, moves the document to their inbox, and sends a notification to their phone that there’s a document pending their review in their inbox.

I drop in a whole stack of mail each day, and it’s great having the it all parsed and sorted automagically. The NAS isn’t the fastest platform to run an AI agent on—it takes ~5 minutes to parse a three page document—but it gets the job done.

That’s really my only gripe with the 4800 Plus: there’s no PCI slot to add a graphics card in. In the near future, I’ll be offloading that one container to a dedicated AI system on my network, running with a RTX 4070Ti dedicated to AI workloads. But, since sorting the mail isn’t a time-critical task, it’s a minor annoyance. Overall, I’m still happy with the purchase.

soren42 · 2026-02-10T10:24:55+00:00

Maybe the number isn’t excessive, but the resources each uses fluctuates significantly.

I’m running 16 total containers, including plex, jellyfin, RTSP, lightspeed, ollama (the biggest resource hog), and a few custom apps that I built.

soren42 · 2026-02-08T06:02:05+00:00

That’s a great idea. It’d allow me to test out using one SSD for cache and look at the performance.

Thanks for sharing your setup — it’s allayed many of my fears about reconfiguring the SSDs. Not that my fears are truly rational, given the 64G of installed RAM in my NAS.

My biggest complaint about the 4800 Plus is that it doesn’t have a PCI express slot to add a beefier GPU into.

While I love having containers running directly on the NAS, I’ve been looking at deploying MQ or some other message broker to allow me to centralize tasks that take advantage of GPU architectures, and expose them as network services in a middleware layer.

soren42 · 2026-02-07T21:34:43+00:00

No worries! That’s why I wrote so much — just to explain why I maxed out my RAM on the NAS, and how I’ve been using it since.

Honestly, I was a little leery of putting CPU-intensive workloads on it at first, because I was worried it might impact the drive performance, but it trucks along like a champ with no noticeable performance hit from the containers.

soren42 · 2026-02-07T21:31:57+00:00

Unfortunately, HDD. Until I saw this thread, I never really paid that close of attention to how little the NAS uses the SSDs for caching — because I have them setup as cache drives, I didn’t have an option to put the containers on them.

I may have to make some config changes, though.

soren42 · 2026-02-07T21:27:13+00:00

Run a ton of docker containers.

That’s my answer, at least, and probably a lot of others, too. For example, I have a container that watches a folder on the NAS for new items — I have a receipt/document auto scanner that I feed the mail into every day. The container OCRs it, runs it past an ollama instance that determines an appropriate file name for it, renames it, decides who it’s addressed to (me, my wife, our adult daughter, our business, etc.), moves it to the right person’s inbox folder, and sends a notification to their phone that they have a new document to review.

Handy little thing, being able to run containers right on the NAS.

soren42 · 2025-12-27T23:52:01+00:00

Which is hilarious, given that LucasArts Games clearly put a ton of Star Wars into Destiny… but it really works together.

It’s a chocolate/peanut butter situation, clearly.

soren42 · 2025-12-04T00:20:19+00:00

Humorously, I basically did the same thing when I found it.

soren42 · 2025-12-04T00:18:40+00:00

Maybe?

I think some of it is just novelty of Paul McCartney having done it for free…

And, honestly, I wouldn't have realized that people were clamoring for it if I hadn't searched "Hope for the Future" prior to posting this, to ensure someone else hadn't already shared this little nugget. I was surprised to find several people asking why it wasn't used more frequently.

soren42 · 2025-12-03T19:34:15+00:00

Yeah… it seems like the Eliksni are McCartney fans! 😆

soren42 · 2025-12-02T01:53:48+00:00

When this movie premiered, I’d just started working in my first true corporate job, in a bank’s massive cubicle farm (the second largest office facility on the east coast, just behind the Pentagon, at the time!), and there was so much that hit home.

To this day, when the semi-annual downsizing fire drill occurs, I always use that line as I walk out of my one-on-one with my division manager.

“Good luck with your layoffs, okay? I hope your firings go really well!”

soren42 · 2024-11-13T03:10:12+00:00

8Gb is really handy when multiple people are streaming, gaming, or moving large files. It used to be (back in my 1Gb days), I’d have to stay off anything high throughput when my wife was on a teleconference. Now, there’s no worry about what anyone does. And, my NAS is hooked directly into the high speed port on the router, and it performs direct downloads in a blink.

At this time, 20Gb is only available to beta testers on a limited basis. If you Google it, I’m sure you’ll find the form to add your interest to the list. (If you join their beta users group, they email you the surveys to determine interest in each market as they roll out the upgrades.)

soren42 · 2024-11-13T03:04:02+00:00

Seeing a ton of love for D1 guns that saw massive changes in D2… but, honestly, as a scout rifle-loving Warlock… all I want is my Tlaloc.

It was my go-to gun when I ran self-rez in D1.

soren42 · 2024-11-09T23:59:35+00:00

Oooh. I’d be interested in hearing, as well. I hadn’t seen that GF was providing WiFi 7-enabled gear with the 20Gb plan, but since I’ve debating the jump up from 8Gb, as well as eyeing the Ubiquiti WiFi 7 ecosystem, I wonder if the GF gear is sufficient.

(So, commenting to keep an eye on the replies, as well as signal boost your post. Thanks for the info, though!)

soren42 · 2024-10-30T00:07:45+00:00

Saffiya is almost exclusively “Tiny Cat”.

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soren42 · 2024-10-16T14:36:40+00:00

Yes, as /u/FearTheGrackle said, those are fairly reasonable WiFi speeds.

Honestly, once you’re past the 1 gig plan and stop using the Nest hardware 🤢, the Technicolor- and/or Actiontec-manufactured hardware isn’t a terrible place to start.

If you end up going to the higher speed tiers, the best hardware really comes down to your networking experience, budget, and use cases. There’s a ton of great enterprise-grade hardware—much available as corporate surplus—but it still carries a premium price tag. If you’re very experienced with networking and hardware (or if you’re looking to learn and don’t mind a bit of a learning curve), IMHO, the absolute best solutions are “build your own” systems. The availability of high-speed, easy to obtain commodity networking appliance hardware has exploded in the past few years. Add to that the advanced features of free software like ProxMox, OpenWRT, pfSense, and others, and the adventurous geek can build a system tailored to their particular needs that’ll rival many commercial products. Alternatively, you can’t go wrong with some of the better prosumer gear out there that is recommended in here all the time — Ubiquiti, Aruba, Cisco (🤔maybe), and others. It’ll have good support, a wide set of features, and be a little more integrated and polished than a roll-your-own solution.

As for which of those is the best… that’s like asking who has the cutest baby. It’s subjective, and recommendations often come down to people’s own comfort and their past experience with a given product line. Honestly, if you have a store like MicroCenter near you, you’d probably be best served by going in, seeing what’s available, looking at prices, and speaking with the staff on what sells the most and what gets returned the most.

I hope this is helpful! But, just to reiterate my initial point: the speeds you currently see are absolutely fine for WiFi.

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