LTE Cat 4 Cell Modem Card

So would I if there was a version that supported a better set of bands :frowning:

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Iā€™d love thisā€¦ If it was 5G. Buying something that already has a successor is not something I can afford to do as a student.

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Interesting. What do you actually need 5G for? I literally canā€™t see why a single device needs anything more than the 300+Mbps that 4G LTE already offers.

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Maybe you donā€™t need faster speeds, but that doesnā€™t mean someone else canā€™t make use of them. Keep in mind the ā€œX speed is good enoughā€ is the same argument US ISPs used before actually upgrading their infrastructure to support higher speeds.

Hereā€™s a counter example in support of higher speeds being useful. Iā€™m out on a road trip and Iā€™m going to be entering a no service/ super slow service zone for a period of time and want to download a bunch of content before I enter that area, but I donā€™t want to sit and wait hours to cache all that data.

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image

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Alright, OK. 50 gigabytes an hour isnā€™t enough to get some content downloaded?? You would have to be seriously unprepared for that trip! Especially to not have a decent WiFi connection to do the downloading with.

Really in that situation, the 5G should be providing the whole householdā€™s WiFi connection rather than just be in the one device that travels.

Realistically, the super fast speeds 5G offers are not going to be likely to be anywhere outside of city centres, where really they only exist to provide capacity, not bandwidth. The rest of the 5G network is basically the same as 4G but with the ability to deliver more broad coverage.

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I could be a trucker whoā€™s sleeping in his rig overnight at a truck stop, and have access to fast speeds at this particular stop, but not when I leave the stop.
Example, video games can be individually 50GB each, my trip is tomorrow morning, I can have 8 games queued up to download overnight with that speed, or if I can get faster speeds, I can download more games before leaving. You can make the argument about being unprepared, but that really isnā€™t the point. The point is the faster speed is useful.

Yup, and some people do this. Point being, there is a use for faster speeds, even if you specifically may not need it, someone else might.

There are places in the US where I could be just down the street from a neighborhood with gigabit speeds, but only be able to receive 40Mbps/5Mbps speeds. This is because ISPs canā€™t justify spending the money to run the cables that extra block. How would someone in this situation get access to higher speed data? Cellular. Which means LTE or maybe 5G (more ideal).

This would be incredible. @Tim_Taylor please reach out if you are looking for contributors, have some HW/SW experience.

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Excellent.

Youā€™re ever able to create a model that supports FirstNet (Band 14), Iā€™d start buying these for work.

Worked fine for DOS. :joy:

Please make this happen, Iā€™m certainly getting one and if you need anyone to test it, I can help, I can do AT&T and Verizon. I just ditch my Thinkpad for the framework and all I can say is, I really miss my internal modem. Hotspot from my phone just does not cut it. It feel like Iā€™m back in the 56k days running, anybody saying otherwise never had the luxury of an internal LTE modemā€¦oh and Iā€™m hot spotting over 5G and my good old 4 years old internal LTE modem was faster.

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This is a great idea! @Tim_Taylor, if you need any help on the HW design and test, I would be happy to help. I have a background in HW design and RF testing (although not 20 years of it). Also, I think that building a global or EU variant of the board would be great! Thereā€™s probably a drop in replacement modem. I know I sure would appreciate it :smile:

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Highly recommend buying some modems from here to test, could even make the modem swappable somehow so it could work with different cellular modems that support different bands if people wanted.

I used this website to put together a system that does WAN aggregation between 3 carriers from my ridgeline to get a way faster connection to my house in the boonies with this huge directional antennas to a cell tower 5 miles away.

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Would love to see a 5G version of such card

For the same reason you probably prefer a car with a high top speed even if 99% of the time you wonā€™t use it :slight_smile:

Why on earth would I buy a car based on a theoretical speed it will never, ever be driven at?

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Chalk me up to the ā€œwould buyā€ categoryā€¦
For those wondering, Sprint/TMobile/Google Fi uses:
LTE Bands: B2, B4, B12, B66, B71
Usually, at minimum LTE B2 and B4ā€¦
So it should have at least some minimal support for Sprint/TMo/Fiā€¦ but I am not sure why the modem you have in there wouldnā€™t also support B12, B66, B17ā€¦
I donā€™t see a BOM, so I am not able to dig deeper into your modem specsā€¦
This has so much promise. Good luck with the device, really looking forward to custom modules like this one. Amazing work!

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Just wondering how far along this is because like the prior poster I would like one as well. Google Fi gives me a free data SIM with my plan, and I would like to put it to use mounted in my framework. Outside the standard card offerings this seems like the missing link to make this perfect system for my everyday use.

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It looks like the OP hasnā€™t posted anything after their initial post and hasnā€™t been seen since Oct 25, '21. So unfortunately, this appears like it isnā€™t going anywhere at least for now.

It might save your life.