Let’s welcome the long weekend with this long post that I’ve been working on over a few weeks. Regular readers may think that, over the years, I’ve become some sort of purpose-driven blogging machine with the last true random posting appearing in the beginning of 2024. Indeed, the site has not gone so long without a random posting and that’s a bit of a shame since these “odds-and-ends” can be rather fun to think about.

For my birthday, I recently got AI to write something that was somewhat akin to a random post, but if there’s something an AI can’t do, it’s read my thoughts and help me unload all of them onto the page. The mental clutter is also reflected in file clutter on my work-in-progress area, where files and assets have sat untouched, waiting for the day I have the chance to show them to the world.

Like a pressure vessel that’s become a bit overpressurised, the safety relief valve has opened and out comes a whole load of random … enjoy! This one’s going to be a reeeeeeeaaallllly long one!

A Month of Vodafone Frustrations?

I’ve been living the “LTE life” for many years and it has always been my preference to choose the cheapest prepaid offering each month, cycling through SIM cards to keep myself connected at the lowest price. After all, data-is-data more-or-less, although different networks have different performance and signal quality – luckily where I am, I’m able to obtain decent reception across all three carriers due to strategic, high modem placement.

It has been a relatively reliable life with my set-up being capable of using the Huawei B818 modem of mine as primary, a USB-connected phone as a back-up connection and a wireless radio as client onto a phone running hotspot for a “reverse-tethering” set-up as yet another back-up. Switching between SIMs is pretty seamless and I can have multiple cards to guard against provider failures or quotas running out. That was, until many of my modem phones saw their life come to an end when they became blocked when the 3G network closed down and they decided the fact they couldn’t place a SIM-less VoLTE emergency call meant that they were no longer useful. That was just stupid, but at least I did replace them with subsidised Motorola G54 5G phones, so I’m not so sore.

Since I wrote the LTE life article, I think that carriers have become wise to the fact most people simply don’t need the raw performance available from a good 4G LTE or 5G NR connection and that speed instead causes rapid “burn-through” of quotas in case of any accidents and issues with managing the airtime resource. So, rather than “forcing” users, especially of cheaper MVNO prepaid plans, to be stuck with 4G LTE, they now let most of them access the 5G network but instead cap the speeds to 100Mbit/s or 150Mbit/s, sometimes more. This is fast enough for practically all applications, but prevents monopolisation of a limited resource – so while I won’t be seeing 300+Mbit/s throughput from my B818 anymore, I’m still happy with this because it lets most users access the network using the best technology they can, keeping airtime clear and preventing congestion on one type of network while bandwidth is underutilised on another. It’s a good idea in general.

But this past month with Vodafone has proved to be an interesting as it seems carriers are starting to “enforce” some rules of theirs. Sticking the latest SIM into the B818 …

… it looked like it was connected but simply, I couldn’t get any data through whatsoever. It wasn’t clear as to what was happening on the network side …

… as the system log on the B818 says that everything is fine. In reality, it appears that they’ve decided that the IMEI’s TAC which identifies it as a Huawei B818 makes it a modem and that they won’t provide me service on the device because they said it was “for phones only”.

It even says it in their Critical Information Summary (CIS). But as a “net neutrality” supporter myself, I would have to counter with the fact that “data, is data, is data”, so this is merely an artificial limitation to segment the market and make you pay more. If they promise quota that they don’t want to be used – that’s their own folly. Perhaps this has something to do with their “infinite data” at 1.5Mbit/s provision – they fear that everyone will be hammering the connection continuously.

Partial balance check audio (call 1511 from a Vodafone Prepaid Plus service):

– with a data balance – vf-dataallow-remain.mp4

– when no data balance remains – vf-dataallow-noremain.mp4

But “infinite” is “infinite” too … and besides, I think the genius of their 1.5Mbit/s service is that it’s fast enough to be just about usable for the very patient, but frustrating enough that it incentivises people to buy a data pack. Slow internet is more frustrating than no internet! But bad news for them – me and my systems are patient, so we’ll keep sucking on that straw until we get what we want and need. This segmentation is not something I support, but I’ve heard that Optus is doing the same with their prepaid SIMs, especially on the weekends when they have “unmetered data”.

As a result, I’ve had to commit one of my Motorola G54s as a modem phone, using hotspot tethering to allow my core router to “reverse-tether” into the phone as the WAN for the whole home network. This works fine – just remember to turn on the overcharge protection for the battery to cap the charging and avoid swollen-battery issues (as was very common in the past).

As the G54 has a 5G radio, the result is a solid 150Mbit/s “speed cap” level of performance, at least during the quiet hours. In the busy hours, where Vodafone formerly would slow to sub-5Mbit/s on LTE, I’m seeing about 12-15Mbit/s in the peak times. So I suppose forcing me off my B818 means that I’m now experiencing a slightly better connection, although having a 5GHz Wi-Fi tethering link does increase the risk of packet loss.

I could have used USB tethering as an alternative, but in my experience with my Mikrotik, I found the speeds less consistent perhaps due to CPU limitations handling the USB 2.0 connectivity. So “reverse-tethering” was the answer for last month.

Now if that was the only issue I faced with Vodafone, it would not be noteworthy. But for some reason, the problems kept coming.

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