There is an outage of some sort in my area. I am doing this with my phone… and J.Kb, you can stop laughing now, young man.
I’ll be back when this crap is fixed…How can anybody blog from a frigging phone?
By Miguel.GFZ
Semi-retired like Vito Corleone before the heart attack. Consiglieri to J.Kb and AWA. I lived in a Gun Control Paradise: It sucked and got people killed. I do believe that Freedom scares the political elites.
How can one blog from a phone? Why, poorly of course!
Have you tried turning it off and on again??
Get out! 🙂
If you have a working phone, you should have working internet. Plug your phone into your computer with USB cable. Tell your phone to act like a modem. You should see a new internet connection show up for you to use. Don’t do a lot that way as you are burning your cell phone data plan, but yeah, you can get it done that way.
I actually had that happen at the house a few months ago. Big storm took down electric and cable modem. So I fired off the backup genset, got power back to the computers, plugged in my phone to the desktop and set it to act like a modem. Got done what I needed to get done and waited for the cable to come back, about three hours later.
There are two internet providers in town, Cable and the Phone company. Cable company is horrible. Only good thing you can say about it is that it is better than the phone company’s service.
I actually had to have a T1 run to the house for a few years when I absolutely required connectivity, 24×7 with good response times. Prior to the T1, mean time to fix was 48 hours. With the T1, mean time to fix was about 30 minutes. Well worth it.
When I ordered the T1 we had cable to the house and I was using my standard VOIP provider. The people we were sharing the house with didn’t trust VOIP so we had to have a land line. So VOIP, cell service on three different accounts and two different carriers and we still needed the land line. But because of the VOIP, the land line terminated at the NID on the outside of the house.
Day of the T1 install, they bring it to the pole and find that there are only two pair to the house, they need two pair for the T1. So instead of pulling a new 6 pair cable, they used the two pair that were there, cutting the land line at the pole.
A month later I’m doing routine checks and find the land line dead. Had to call for a repair. It was the repair dude that discovered this and had to run the new 6 pair cable. And then the T1 group had to come out to certify the new cable from the pole to the house. But this is the quality I expect from the local phone company. They are just incompetent at all speeds.
Yeah, I finally figured the Mobile Hotspot in the phone. But it SUCKS THE HELL OUT OF THE BATTERY LIKE A HUNGRY SCHOOL OF PIRAHNAS! 😀
Yes, setting up a hotspot eats battery. That is why I strongly suggested using the wired modem route. Many carriers (Verizon for example) charge extra for hotspots. They also rate limit hotspots. Plus, as you noted, they eat battery. The phone has to have good signal to the tower which means that radio is burning power and it has to be transmitting as a wifi access point, taking still more power.
If you use your phone as a modem you get better speeds, your carrier doesn’t see you using it as a hotspot so doesn’t rate limit or bandwidth limit, your phone is plugged into a power source so is charging or at least not burning the battery down as fast.
So pick up a USB cable for your phone that has the right connector to plug into your computer. If you have a modern Android then it would be USB-C for the phone and USB-A for the computer. Unfortunately some people are stuck with weird connectors because their phone or computer starts with a lower case ‘i’.
VERY short posts… Just sayin…