This post is supposed to be an update on the 4G-to-Wifi series Upgrading Grandparents' Wifi I did previously. But discussing with my family has led me to contemplate that saying. My country has a similar one: cure a healthy pig and make it lame as a result or chữa lợn lành thành lợn què.
The update
After a month of running my grandparents' network on 4G, on April 23 2023, the project was effectively shut down. The Mi Wifi R3G router was instead connected to SCTV cable Internet, which is rated at 50 Mbps. A few problems rose from the project:
- 4G network was unstable. Sure, it worked. But it disconnected every few days, forcing me to reconnect it.
- It wasn't as fast as I hoped. When the towel wasn't congested, it could reach 80 Mbps. But most of the time, inconsistent from 15 to 50 Mbps. That wasn't any better than our cable Internet. It could be because the 4G USB modem is cheap, so the antenna quality wasn't good, or it couldn't utilize Carrier Aggregation, which is something you'd find on modern smartphones. My phone can easily reach 190 Mbps download out of our nearest towel alone.
- Double pay. We already paid for our cable Internet, now I had to pay my own to do this experiment. So it wasn't meant to last.
So now the 4G modem sits in my inventory, occasionally being pulled out of its slumber so I can test it on my laptop for fun. Guess it can only be used as backup.
The proverb
My hobby is interesting. I regularly install, uninstall, dismantle, reassemble things more times than I could count. But it comes with karma. I can't stop. Like if there was something to improve technologically in my house, or there were techs that intrigued me, I would try it out, which usually ends up breaking everything else. Can't count the number of close-calls I had with my devices breaking because of the new things I put in, lack of precaution, no backup plan... I am constantly reminded by my family "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". It's a similar thing I learned when I was still working as a software developer. Because a lot of functions in a software are built on top of each other, they act like a domino chain. If one falls, every one will fall, too. Heck, my 4G-to-wifi project had to be pulled partly because of my endless experiments on the Pi router end up breaking the network from time to time. My family said: "Enough with this. Return everything back to normal. You had your fun. If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Maybe they're right. After all, this is just to satisfy my boundless curiosity. Nobody is going to care where they got their Internet from, or how fast. They only concern whether it will get them to Facebook. To them, a DNS Server to speed up 1 second of scrolling through posts does nothing. It does to me. It makes a 50 Mbps cable Internet feel like it can match the snappiness of a 150 Mbps fiber connection.
I feel like anyone who is an artisan, an engineer, a mechanic, or works in the technology sector, may run into something similar to the problem I have.