A few months ago I knew Optus was rolling out the shiny 5G services but to my surprise it’s available in my suburb already. It took NBN years.

It’s a tough time at the moment as everyone is ordered to stay home, but it’s a perfect time to upgrade my home broadband and without paying more: The 5G plan costs $70/month and has unlimited data, same as my NBN50 price, but much faster. The deal is here.

I placed my order online on Sunday, it was processed on Monday and 3 days later I received the Nokia 5G gateway. It’s really big and heavy comparing to any DSL or Cable modem I’ve ever used.

It’s much easier to install this thing, if this can be called an installation at all. Basically I only need to put it on a surface near a window and facing the 5G tower and power it on. It will compare signal strength among its 5 antennas and indicate the one it will use. (So why have 5 antennas in the first place?) For me I’m very lucky because I can see the telecomm tower through my window so I pointed the active antenna at the tower with laser precision then doing the speed test which I waited for too long.

It’s about 8 times faster than my NBN when downloading and 2.5 times faster when uploading. I used to prefer a wired connection, but not anymore.

There’s 1 issue though: there’s no public IP allocated to the gateway. I guess that makes sense as cellular devices never have a real IP anyway. This translates to that I can’t do either uPnP or port forwarding! How can I still host this little blog in a Raspberry Pi in garage then?

(the answer is in next blog) 🙂