In today's video, I wanted to take a look at
getting a Netgear LB 1120 or 1121 LTE cellular modem hooked up with Google Fi as the cellular
provider. Now I've been a subscriber with Google Fi for a couple of years now and I greatly enjoy
the service for a number of reasons. One of the little-known benefits that you can get with Google
Fi is a free data only SIM. The great thing about this is that you pay nothing for the SIM card
itself and you only pay for the data usage that you consume. In my case I was looking at this to
do cellular backup for my home network. Seemed great since I would pay nothing for the SIM card
and then only if I failed over my home internet connection to the cellular backup would I be
paying just for the data that I used. So let's go ahead and take a look at the steps required to
set this up. First we'll go to Google Fi's website which I'm already logged in - and we'll go ahead
and go down to manage plan. We'll scroll down a little bit and you can see that I already have a
couple of devices, including the SIM card that I already ordered for this project. If we needed to
order another one however, we could just go to add data only SIM - and it'll prompt us to tell us
a little bit about how the pricing and structure works. We'll hit continue, and it will ask us
to make sure that our device that we're using on this network is compatible. Now in our case
the modem isn't technically officially supported, however it does support the LTE cellular bands
that T-Mobile uses on the back end. So we should have no problem running this. Next we'll go ahead
and click order SIM. The site will prompt us to confirm our address and confirm zero dollar
shipping - and we can go ahead and hit confirm purchase. Now again in my case I already ordered
one of these and it just arrived so let's go ahead and jump to looking at setting up the device. Once
your SIM card arrives from Google Fi you'll get a pretty minimal looking envelope that contains your
SIM card and a secret code which I've gone and hadn't blacked out, because I've already used it,
but you'll need that to go ahead and activate your SIM card. So let's go ahead and pop this out, and
an additional thing that you'll need is a adapter, because the SIM card that's provided by Google
Fi is a little bit small than what we need for the modem. So we'll go ahead and snap this in
here.. if I can turn it around the right way.. there we go. All right - next we go ahead and
take a look at our modem. This is the LB 1121, I went ahead and opted for the power over ethernet
model. While this still does have a power port, we're going to go ahead and use this with just
a single in an Ethernet connection powered by a PoE switch. This is just to go ahead and reduce
the cabling and my PoE which is backed up by a battery backup - so if I ever were to lose power,
the modem would still retain power because of me getting it from the switch itself. All right on
the bottom you'll see a couple of things... We will need to note the username and password
that is used to go ahead and login to the web interface once we get it up and running.
And then right under here, we'll see our SIM card slot this is going to go ahead and pop down
and open up and we'll place our SIM card inside. Can be a little bit finicky, you might have to
hold it down a little bit and then make sure that it closes properly. We'll go ahead and put
our cover back on and we're all set and ready to go. Okay so now I have the modem plugged into
my desktop, just to go ahead and get it set up and running. So first we'll go ahead and see if
our modem is online... and it looks like we are in fact getting an IP address from our default
gateway, which we'd expect - 192.168.5.1 which is the modem. That address is also
printed on the bottom of the modem, so we know that that's what we need to hit. So go
and launch a web browser and go to that address. Then we can go ahead and login with the
password that we found on the bottom of the device. And first we'll see that we're
actually already connected to T-Mobile for 3G internet. Now the problem here is that
our provider is Google Fi not T-Mobile - so we may run into connectivity issues. So
the first thing that we'll need to do is go ahead and change our settings to Google
FI. So we'll go down to the settings menu, and over to the mobile tab, and then under APN
we see that it's already set up for T-Mobile as we saw before. We can click Add for a new
provider - for name we'll put in Google Fi. And for APN will type in h2g2. And then go
ahead and hit save. And now we're gonna select that as our active profile, and we'll even go
ahead and just delete the T-Mobile profile. Now sometimes this may connect
automatically.. I've found it best to go ahead and just go back to the software
page and restart the device. Okay so now the device is back online and we do have our
4G connection - it doesn't say Google Fi, and I found that the interface is a little bit
buggy... sometimes it will, sometimes it won't, sometimes it'll just show this... but we are
connected with the appropriate carrier now. So the other thing I want to look at is a
couple of additional settings we might want to configure. So we'll go to settings, and over
to advanced, and under the LAN tab we have a couple of configuration options. So for one we can
choose whether or not we want this to operate in bridge mode or router mode. The difference here
is that if we're operating this in router mode, then the modem itself is taking in the external
connection from Google Fi and translating that into a connection that multiple different
computers could use on a local network. In addition, our modem will hand out IP addresses
to the systems on the network - so they are all able to connect out over the cellular
connection. Now in my case it might be better to use something called bridge mode.
And in this case I'm going to be hooking up the modem directly to my home firewall
- and bridge mode would allow the modem to pass through the external IP addressing
and connectivity straight to my firewall. So that from my firewall's perspective it looks
like it just has another internet connection, not that it's connecting through another router /
through a cellular modem. Changing these settings is going to depend on how you intend on using
the modem and what effect you want to accomplish. Okay that's it for this video. If you're
interested in seeing how I perform the cellular backup using my home firewall, check
out the next video which should be out soon.
