07-31-2026 — Beginning of end

Howdy all. Today is the last day of July. Wow, that got here quickly. A lovely, dry, day outside. It may rain tomorrow, I hope.

Yesterday, Kinetic arrived at just a minute before the end of their estimated window. 11:50 am. The install went relatively smoothly.

He did spend about 10-15 minutes helping the other truck up the street, before starting here.

They were able to connect from the buried box, beside the box you see in the yard, and drilled through the wall real close to the TV stand and the network corner unit behind it.

He had some issues getting the system activated from the main office, but he was still out of here by 2:30 pm.. And, by some miracle, they diggers came back today and buried the line outside already. It has been taking 7-10 days for the houses around me. Should make my mowing guys happy that both my place, and the neighbor they do, don’t have exposed cables.

After Kinetic left, I played around with the configurations long enough to get both the Kinetic, and the T-Mobile gateways to be “controlled” by the Ubiquity Uniti device. I set them up to load balance at 50% each.

Before I switched the providers so that Kinetic (Windstream) was the primary on port 5.

This morning it was time to set up the network as I wanted it to be. Well, Almost!!!

Phew.  I had to fight a bunch to get the Blink sync modules to recognize the new setup, but I think I have the Internet network setup done.   A couple of things changed from my plan.  Apparently Kinetic changed from using an Ethernet Gateway to using an ONT — optical network terminal (fancy modem only!!).  And then Ethernet cable to the EERO-7 router.  I was expecting to use multiple SSIDs on a router from the gateway they used to supply.  

The good news is that, the EERO 7 device negotiates with the connected devices to use 2.4 GHz or 5 or whatever up to WiFI 7.  So, I used the primary SSID as Actiontec6 that connects to computers and such.  And the guest as Actiontec2 that hits my blink sync modules and many of the other IOT devices.   And plugged an Ethernet cable into the EERO 7 to a switch to plug in my old Google Mesh that was also 2.4GHz as Actiontec.  

Having both Actiontec and Actiontec2 SSIDs means I don’t have to reconfigure about 50 devices.  

Oh, the EERO 7 and TMobile 5G gateway are plugged into correct WAN ports now, of the Ubiquity Cloud Gateway device which allows load balancing between the two, with Kinetic being the Primary, just in case.

There is also one more Google Mesh device plugged directly into the Ubiquity box to get me WiFi access to the control panel within without hard wiring.    Just don’t want a cable running from my laptop to it for monitoring and configuring.  

That is some neighbor’s Kinetic connection at the bottom. And I still have a “direct” link to the TMobile gateway too.

So every IOT device I have tried is still working and the network diagram is so much cleaner.  Not too mention I have lots of freed up devices that were using phantom electricity ⚡️ Not to mention that I have a bunch fewer SSIDs.  

Tomorrow I will attempt to get YouTube TV up and running on the TVs. Family Room and Master Bedroom.  I also have trash bags of equipment to return to Spectrum and AT&T.   And a set of Mesh routers from TP Link. WiFi 6 level.  
But I am done for today.  Mentally and physically beat.

Oh, before I go, here was yesterday’s morning harvest after watering the garden beds.

The red tomatoes are much redder today.

I also picked these flowers up from the ground, where some critter left them, after gnawing the stems from the plants. I just jammed them into the hedge to give them a way to stand upright.

Others, in that same bed, haven’t bloomed yet. But there are a lot of stems chewed off too. Notice how dead the lawn is..

I’m not going to chase off the critters. They deserve a good meal, and to Enjoy Life