Re: [LUG] Fwd: 🎉 Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) PRICE CUT! Plus a FREE gift!

On Sat, 29 Feb 2020 at 23:10, mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm being (perhaps?) unreasonable, it's a lot to ask for at that price
point. I "only" want an off-the-shelf ARM SBC which'll run a turnkey
network appliance distro and two NICs at acceptable gigabit speeds.
Which doesn't sound like a lot for 2020 really. Or does it? I genuinely

These things exist - but at quite a high price point for the usual reason that it's not used by the average consumer, and even SOHOs quite often go with a bog standard isp-supplier router and nothing else. (Maybe a vpn or two) This is changing, but so so slowly.

boards a few years back. Great little things but so limited in
throughput that our clients were rapidly outpacing the line speed they
could handle. But then so were the crappy and much more expensive Ciscos

I know the problem. Someone I know maintains a 200mbps supply to an office building which is creaking. Pricing up a fast supply is easy, and suprisingly cheap considering. But it would mean replacing both primary and secondary sonicwalls as they wouldn't be able to keep up with the speed. That complicates and increases the cost massively.

scalable enough. A small compact and power sipping little RPi that'll
sit inline with the ISP router juggling packets and QoS, security, VPN
and so on for <£100? I'd get through tens, if not hundreds, of them.

Then we're definitely on different tangents... :)

Totally missed your point about your fluctuating bandwidth being the
issue rather than the maximum throughput, my bad. But I'm very
interested in £20 PCM unlimited data plan SIMs. Tell me more!

I started looking at this a couple of months ago, and spotted Three did an unlimited sim. It was priced at £33 and I was tempted, but the two year contract was a hard no from me.

I searched again last week and came across https://smarty.co.uk/ Nice website, quite a giffgaffy feel (Who I quite like) and they resell what I suspect is the same package for £20 on a rolling monthly contract.

As you may know, no mobile provider will guarantee speed (they'll barely guarantee coverage), and how that speed fluctuates with contention remains to be seen. It's also obvious that relying on somebody else's experience for speed, latency and reliability is not going to be useful. But I've ordered one and it will be interesting to see what it's like.